My Father, the Panda Killer
by Jamie Jo Hoang
High School    Crown    384 pp.
8/23    9780593642962    $18.99
Library ed.  9780593642979    $21.99
e-book ed.  9780593642986    $10.99

In this unflinching dual-perspective coming-of-age story, a California teen who at first loathes being Vietnamese gains pride in her heritage while also coming to terms with her emotionally distant, physically abusive refugee father. It’s the summer of 1999, and Jane V, seventeen, is about to leave San Jose to attend UCLA. She is excited about college but worries about leaving her seven-year-old brother with their single father, Phúc. In lyrically ­written chapters that alternate with Jane’s narrative, readers follow Phúc’s traumatic youth in war-torn Vietnam, including acts of love and of violence within his family, and his harrowing escape by boat on the Pacific Ocean. He survives attacks by Thai pirates and starvation only to lose his final shred of innocence with the titular panda-killing. The twin tales of complicated family love come together when Jane gains sympathy for her father after she learns more about his experiences from cousins at a family reunion, and then later while visiting her grandparents in Đà Nng. Hoang does a skillful job in capturing multigenerational trauma with Jane’s teenage angst and Phúc’s damaging voyage. Pair with the adult graphic memoirs Vietnamerica by G. B. Tran and The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (illustrator of A Different Pond, rev. 9/17).

From the September/October 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.