{ "item_title" : "Real Americans", "item_author" : [" Rachel Khong "], "item_description" : "A Read With Jenna Book Club Pick!A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK - From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? Mesmerizing--Brit BennettA page turner.--Ha JinGorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft--Andrew Sean GreerTraverses time with verve and feeling.--Raven Leilani Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers. In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance--a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home. Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/59/353/725/0593537254_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "29.00", "online_price" : "29.00", "our_price" : "29.00", "club_price" : "29.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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It’s the mid-1960s, right at the start of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and the Red Guards are methodically upending—many would say demolishing—the cultural heritage of China. Books are burned, artifacts are smashed, history is erased. But two plucky biology students, Mei and Peng, are determined to rescue a lotus seed from the university library. 

This isn’t just any seed. It is a seed from thousands of years ago, allegedly dropped from the sky by a dragon as a gift for a long-ago emperor, with the power to confer a wish on its recipient.  But the emperor died before getting to make that wish. Mei, a scientist by nature, is skeptical of the legend, but she wants to protect the seed from the Red Guards, so she takes it.

Here, Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga Real Americans splits into three narratives, following Mei, her daughter and her grandson through 60-odd tumultuous years after she immigrates to America. The narration isn’t linear; Mei, who plays the pivotal role at the book’s brief outset, largely recedes into the background until the final third of the book, when, as an elderly retired geneticist, she reflects on her life choices and how they have affected her family: “Aren’t we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it’s you and I who are here. . . . In this place, on this small blue rock, innumerable miracles: redwoods, computers, stingrays, pianos, you and me.” 

Through intervening events and discoveries, Khong implicitly asks a very pertinent question: What does it mean to be a “real American”? Is it enough to be born in the U.S.? Can you assimilate from a foreign country, a foreign culture? Is there something in our genetics that binds us inevitably to the lands of our ancestral origins? Real Americans’ answers are at once complex and compelling, as science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic. As the three narrative strands merge, their denouement is unexpected yet perhaps predestined: the fruit of a seed planted long ago.