Family In Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, An American Daughter

"As a mother, Vietnamese American novelist Lan Cao struggles to provide emotional security for Harlan – her teenage daughter – while suffering from the “hybrid, chaotic, unstable” legacy of her refugee experience. As a daughter, Harlan intuitively accepts that she and Lan are exiled in their own separate ways but at the same time “very attached to each other.” As a mother-and-daughter memoir, Family in Six Tones poetically captures fragmentation and the search for wholeness through a full reckoning with the past."