Grass Roof, Tin Roof [Paperback]

Dao Strom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 7, 2003

In this stunning novel about a Vietnamese family resettling in the isolation of California gold country, Dao Strom investigates the myth of westward progress and the consequences of cultural displacement.

Told from multiple perspectives and interwoven with the intimate reflections of a middle child, Grass Roof, Tin Roof begins with the story of Tran, a Vietnamese writer facing government persecution, who flees her homeland during the exodus of 1975 and brings her two children to the West. Here she marries a Danish American man who has survived a different war. He promises understanding and guidance, but the psychic consequences of his past soon hinder his relationships with the family. The children, for whom the war is now a distant shadow, struggle to understand the world around them on their own terms.

In delicate, innovative prose, Strom's characters experience the collision of cultures and the spiritual aftermath of war on the most visceral level. Grass Roof, Tin Roof is a beautiful work of profundity and empathy, powerful emotion and rare insight.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

One difficulty of novels with multiple stories and points of view is that readers can become attached to an especially charismatic character and not want to relinquish him or her. So it is with Grass Roof, Tin Roof, Dao Strom's thoughtful and adept debut. The book begins in Vietnam on the verge of the Communist takeover and describes the dangerous career in political journalism of Than, a young woman whose real aim had been to write a romantic serial inspired by Gone with the Wind. Than's lover and mentor, a mysterious figure named Giang, has been signing his own articles with her name, and eventually, although the words are rarely hers, Than acquires the manner and confidence of an investigative reporter. When the newspapers are shut down, and Than gives birth to Giang's illegitimate daughter, she has little choice but to leave for America. Another writer would stop the tale at this crucial transition, but Strom's novel is not a simple love story set against brutality and oppression. Like a vine, her narrative twists and pushes forward, flowering at unexpected points. The American portions of Grass Roof, Tin Roof are as well sustained, if not as vividly hued, as the opening. If we regret the shift in focus away from the engaging Than, we are soon enough drawn into the lives of Than's children and their Danish-born stepfather.

Dao Strom, like the child of Than and Giang, was born in Saigon to a literary mother and brought to America as an infant during the 1975 exodus. With a sagacity that belies her youth, she evokes the divided mind of the refugee and the child of two cultures. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

Strom's debut novel traces a Vietnamese family's bumpy path to immigration and assimilation in California. Trinh Ahn Tran is a freethinking Saigon journalist in the 1970s-one of few such women-known for witty columns that critique all sides of Vietnamese politics. Interrogated and increasingly harassed by the government, Tran flees Saigon with her two children in a 1975 airlift. In California, she marries a condescending, authoritarian Danish immigrant, Hus Madsen, who frightens and alienates her children as well as his and Tran's own daughter. Strom tells the story from the alternating perspectives of mother, son and two daughters. Her description of the Saigon newspaper office and the flight from Vietnam is gripping, and she offers some affecting scenes of the family's tenuous suburban existence as well: a redneck accuses Hus ("Hoss") of shooting his dog in a tense confrontation. Tran's withdrawn teenage son, Thien, gets stuck in a paralyzing relationship with his girlfriend, Valerie, whose recitation of AA mantras drives him nuts. Strom's characterizations are uneven, however; she could have used a lighter touch in depicting Hus's cruelty, and the sections about idealistic middle daughter April and the trip she takes to Saigon in 1996 are less effective. The narrative loses steam as it turns to the children's coming-of-age struggles, which tend to be familiar fare about first sexual encounters and racial identity questions. With her spare, matter-of-fact prose, Strom shows promise, but she doesn't manage to sustain the narrative tension and acuity that distinguish the first half of this novel.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618145591
• ISBN-13: 978-0618145591
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,490,009 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dao Strom was born in Saigon, Vietnam and grew up in the hills of northern California. She is the author of Grass Roof, Tin Roof, a novel, and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, a book of stories. Dao is also a writer of songs, with two independent releases, Send Me Home and Everything That Blooms Wrecks Me -- also available here on Amazon.

The New Yorker described Dao's latest book, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006), as being "filled with social observation of contemporary...culture and indie sensibility," "quietly beautiful," and "hip without being ironic." Venus Zine described it as "an acute, often painful, exploration of identity, displacement, and sexuality."

Dao is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award, the James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, and other honors. Her stories have been anthologized in Still Wild: Short Fiction of the West, compiled by Larry McMurtry, as well as Charlie Chan Is Dead 2, an anthology of Asian American fiction edited by Jessica Hagedorn, and Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, published by the Asian American Writers Workshop.

An essay on motherhood and family appears in The May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Career and Pulling It all Together in your 30s, edited by Andrea Nicole Richesin (Penguin Putnam).

Dao's music can be found at: www.daostrom.bandcamp.com.

Dao lives in Portland, Oregon.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a sincere and haunting read, June 30, 2003

By 

rentapoet (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Paperback)

Although I agree with some of the reviewers' comments that this is an uneven first novel, there are many gorgeous passages and vivid images that should not be missed. Strom's story moves gracefully from one continent to the next, from one context to the next, and in so doing, captures a multi-faceted and fascinating portrait of contemporary Californians and the current state of the American "melting pot". This story will stick with you, and, as the reviewers say, leave you wishing for more. In this case, consider that a compliment rather than a fault.