The Bookish Mindset

Overview:

Title: Dust Child
Author: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
Published: April 2023
Genre: Historical, Literary
Themes: Family, Greif

One sentence summary: Four seemingly unconnected individuals find their lives crossed across Vietnam as they wouldn’t have imagined.

One sentence review: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai has done it again, Dust Child is absolutely stunning.

Review:

Trang and Quynh are sisters and desperate to help their parents settle debts left by crooks. Phong hopelessly searches for his father so he take his family to America. Dan wants to find the love he lost while he was at war.

Told across multiple stories and generations, the four find their paths colliding as they never would have expected.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai has done it again. I don’t believe I can do her work justice with my words but I will do my best:

Dust Child is a story about loss, love and family so be prepared to have your heartstrings pulled on. Dust children are the children left behind by the Vietnamese war, often children of American soldiers. When the war ended, they were left to fend for themselves, often pushed to the edge of society and hence their name.

The care she has taken in researching the stories in this book shine through on each page. There is such tender love and care in the way she curates stories that make you feel the weight of her words in the pages.

These characters are not perfect, nor could they be, but they are deep and meaningful in the way they are built. I felt so much love for them in all their grief and anguish. Each of them goes on such a journey through this book but I won’t mention them because it was truly wonderful to go in with little expectation.

I want to share two quotes with you that stuck out to me; the first that unite all readers and the second that summarises the book beautifully:

“Experiencing the same books enabled people to travel on similar journeys and brought them closer together.”

“At the end of each war, whoever wins, the people lose.”

If you loved The Mountains Sing, or haven’t read it but love intergenerational tales of woe and hope, then this is absolutely one for you. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is absolutely an auto-buy author for me and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.

If reading more is something that you’re looking at doing this year then should check my reading challenge out here! Read nine books from nine prompts over the first six months of the year and be entered into a draw to win a bundle of bookish goodies.

If you’d like to get yourself a copy, you can support local bookshops while doing so on Bookshop.org with this link here.

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And don’t forget to check out my other blogs and reviews – you can find books with similar themes in the same folder link below, or click back onto blogs to see the whole offering.

Last updated 31/03/2025