Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family. As young adults, they’re on the precipice of new ventures: Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naïve freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America creates a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.
Cut off entirely from the outside world, forced to work jobs they hate, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long, dusty days in camp and acclimate to life without the internet. That is, until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this connection as a chance to tell the world about the horrors of camp—and as an opportunity to bolster her own reporting career in the process.
Rather than slide into polemic or tragic melodrama, Nguyen leans into the tension between the four half-siblings to unpack the complicated roles that surveillance, big tech and journalism play in our fractured modern state ... Risk and desperation give the book the fresh edge of a thriller while maintaining its larger focus as an entwined story of family and imperialist history.
Comically macabre ... The writer is a stellar satirist ... Moments of violence are more impactful because they occur against scenes of humor and occasional mundanity ... Nguyen deftly finds a middle ground between playful critic and cleareyed observer. Even at its most ridiculous, the book feels eerily plausible ... Kevin Nguyen has written a very American novel indeed.
Nguyen’s barbed social commentary convincingly depicts a dystopian America that’s both distinct from and similar to the country we know today ... While the world-building successfully critiques tech giants, the mainstream media, corporate influence and public education, it also hems in plot and character development ... Through Ursula’s narrative arc, the book seems more concerned with critiquing the way people consume trauma via the media than it is with the actual trauma of imprisonment ... The book’s violent and tragic climax feels both inevitable and somewhat discordant with the rest of the book.
