I had the pleasure of reviewing Vu Tran’s debut novel Dragonfish for The Life Sentence. An excerpt:
The novel opens with Oakland police officer Robert Ruen, who is having a crisis of faith. He can’t get over being abandoned by his wife, Suzy, a Vietnamese immigrant haunted by her past. Robert knows he should move on with his life but he can’t let go of his marriage: “at the pit of me was not sadness or anger but the hollowness of forgetting how to need someone.” His feeling of having failed Suzy as a husband is exacerbated by the knowledge that he never really knew her, that there was a part of her personality that he could never reach, and when she retreated to that place she was utterly unknowable. Is Suzy a difficult person? Is she mentally ill? Or is there something more mysterious troubling her that’s harder to define?