Boat Baby: A Memoir by Vicky NguyenMy rating: 3.75 of 5 stars
Although Vicky Nguyen is on a popular broadcast news network, I have never heard of her. I’m not one to watch broadcast news actually. In any case, her story of being an immigrant from Vietnam was one I wanted to read. There are some similarities to my sister-in-law and her family, to some degree. Although, I think my in laws had a more harrowing experience with the pirates on their boat.
The first half of this book describes her parents background, their leaving Vietnam, and her early years; these were great reading. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author and loved hearing the Vietnamese pronunciation, even though it may be an Americanized version as she states.
Somewhere along the way the story seemed to lose some focus, or maybe it was my interest. There were some things discussed, talked about in the book that wasn’t full explored, left me as a reader wondering why was that included. Other times, a situation felt important to her and her family, but not to me as a reader. Maybe I just don’t get memoirs sometimes.
For myself the ending was abrupt, or overall there was a missing part of the book, what exactly I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it is emotion, although that is not fully absent. In any case, I’m glad I read this book, learned about another person’s lived experience which is different than mine. There definitely needs to be more books like this.
Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an uncorrected electronic advance review copy of this book. However, I listened to a published audiobook copy of the book.
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