PositiveNewsday\"What emerges in Lauren Hilgers’ quietly emotive Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown is the distance between expectation and reality in the modern immigrant experience ... Escaping all that is what brought Zhuang to America, where he found different hopes and hardships — the regular ones found by all immigrants. The country doesn’t need Trump to make the immigrant experience strange and discomfiting. Hilgers shows how difficult yet vital it always is.\
Ben Fountain
RaveNPRThe war, of course, hangs heavily over the novel, but the book's literal subject is football, and through football Fountain excavates the issues of 21st century homefront American life … Over the course of his day as guest of honor at the Cowboys-Bears contest, Billy encounters the 1 percent in the owner's box, and the 99 percent deep in the bowels of the stadium … It's more common for baseball to be the national pastime of choice in literature, but reading Billy Lynn, it's hard to imagine an America outside of Texas Stadium. Then again, perhaps you don't need to. Maybe the 21st century, with all it's problems and glories, is just a football type of time.
