We’re in the midst of a kitchen renovation. It has rendered half our first floor inoperable, turned our basement into a living room/kitchen, and made my oldest dog very, very unhappy with us when we go out*.
*He’s gone from free reign of the house to being cooped up in one room—a hard life, I know.
With this backdrop, I finished reading Real Americans by Rachel Khong and this first world problem of living around a kitchen renovation felt the perfect juxtaposition to set beside this review.
I’ve been particularly interested in generational stories lately, ones which delve into how our unique identities are formed and the impact our upbringing and setting have on who we are and who we become.
Real Americans is a study of destiny and fortune. It follows three generations, beginning in the middle, and taking the reader into a slightly sci-fi world while still balancing realistic dramas that take place in average families. There are three perspectives in this story, the third, my least favorite, yet even so, the ending was satisfying. The kind of ending where with only a few pages remaining you say to yourself How are they going to wrap this up? and then, masterfully, they do.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes:
“I often wondered what percentage of things I said were truly original, and how much of what I said I’d heard said before and was only repeating.”
“…what love was seemed so clear to me: the need to guard against loss.”
“It was only after seeing the trees here, I realized, that I could describe what home was like.”
“There was so much expectation placed on the young, who were uniformly full of potential, who could change the world, until they did or didn’t.”
“As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.”
“In trying to leave the past behind, like a shadow, it followed you.”
Rating: 4/5
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