Pioneer GirlPioneer Girl

"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.