Real Americans
Ratings3
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings3
Average rating4.3
How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?
Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn’t be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can’t shake the sense she’s hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.
In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.
Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?
Reviews with the most likes.
I really enjoyed Lily and Nick's POVs but Mei's was a little harder to follow for me. On the one hand I wasn't a fan of Mei's parts but on the other hand it also went to show that Khong can give different characters their unique voices and flairs which is always impressive.
Sprawling family sagas aren't my thing but it was done exceptionally well here and with such a reasonable number of pages I'm really impressed with how organic and unrushed the storytelling came across as. Seriously, with the topics this book approaches I expected it to be on the ponderous and slightly pretentious side but it was neither, I found it almost charming (oddly enough) and entirely unpretentious. On a technical aspect I would absolutely give this one a 5/5.
It was my first time reading this author and it will certainly not be the last.
Divided into three parts, each focusing on one character from the main family. The first two were fantastic, but the third a fair amount weaker, and the ending I felt wasn't great (we don't get much resolution between Nick and Matthew). It was also a bit weird how cold and distant a lot of the characters were towards their family, seemingly only for plot purposes. But overall I still really enjoyed it.
