“A powerful and wholly original American saga.” —
San Francisco Chronicle
Bich Minh Nguyen’s previous books—the acclaimed memoir
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner
and the American Book Award–winning novel
Short Girls
—established her talents as a writer of keen cultural observation. In
Pioneer Girl
, Nguyen entwines the Asian American experience with the escapist pleasures of literature, in a dazzling mystery about the origins of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic
Little House on the Prairie
.
Lee Lien has long dodged her Vietnamese family’s rigid expectations by immersing herself in books. But now, jobless with a PhD in literature, she is back at home, working in her family’s restaurant under her mother’s hypercritical gaze—until an heirloom from their past sends Lee on a search for clues that may lead back to Wilder herself, transforming strangers’ lives as well as her own.