Real Americans is full of so many things... family, immigrant experience, coming of age, first love, science fiction, and a splash of magical realism. I just loved all the characters and their imperfections, often misbehaving but ultimately trying to survive in the America they are living in. This is a perfect book club pick with so much to digest and discuss.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.

Really was interested in this book & read it pretty quickly. I appreciated that the complexity built the longer you read & that really worked to keep me engaged in the plot. I enjoyed the questions of science & the boundaries of what science should or should not do. I also really enjoyed the conversations around race that entered into these questions. I'll read more by Khong in the future.

Real Americans by Rachel Khong
(This review is based on an ARC sent to me from NetGalley)

Rachel Khong's new novel explores who gets to be 'Real Americans'.
The book spans several generations. There are things to learn on both sides of the generational divide.
A story of young love in New York city, a young man coming of age in the Pacific North West, and a Chinese student who determines her own future in a country where Communism is taking hold.
The author covers the concepts of Genetcs, Power and Ethics.
Society brings pre conceived notions based on superficial traits.
The three generations of Chinese Americans in the novel grapple for self determination.
The book is in three novella-length sections, each told from the perspective of a different character, plus a prologue.

REAL AMERICANS
Rachel Khong

Three generations. Lily is a mom. Nick, is her son, and Mae, is her mother. We sit in with them as they discuss life and the current situation they find themselves in. There is a line weaving through the story that connects the characters and the generations that were as surprising as it was inventive and unique.

Lily has just met Matt. He seems like the representation of dreams she doesn’t remember dreaming. Perhaps someone else’s idea of the perfect husband, Lily marries him anyway. Sure whatever dreams may come are sure to be better than the nightmares she’s dreamed before.

Nick is Lily’s son, and he is attending college. With a strained relationship with his mother and an absent father, he decides to find out who his father is. What he finds will raise questions about Lily’s life, her past, and how that ultimately influenced Nick’s life.

It’s an interesting cross-section of three people who only have lineage in common. And how that one thing can sometimes be the only thing holding a family together.

I had no idea where the book was going. It surprised me and shouldn’t have. Had I read the synopsis I would’ve found out who we were following. Remarkably it was a fun experience reading it not knowing who was going to narrate next.

Now that I’ve spoiled that experience for you, I might as well tell you about the book.

I had a great time reading REAL AMERICANS and I’m so glad I picked it up. The exploration of the dynamics between the family members was very interesting. I had a lot of questions about what we owe the people we love in this life. And sometimes the obvious answer isn’t the right one. The only way to know is to answer it incorrectly.

Thanks to Netgalley, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf for the advanced copy!

REAL AMERICANS…⭐⭐⭐⭐

Told through three timelines, Real Americans is a sweeping family saga and I was all in!

The story first follows Lily, a recent college graduate in NYC in the late 90s who meets Matthew, her complete opposite. Despite their seemingly endless differences, the two opposites attract. The story then follows Nick, a 15 year old in 2021, who is curious about his biological father and will pursue information, with or without his mother’s help. After that, a third perspective is revealed, bringing answers to many of the family’s long lingering questions.

I was hooked on Real Americans from the start. It’s a story that explores identity, success, science, culture, and more. I was invested in all three parts of the story though it took longer for the final section to grow on me and keep my interest like the first two did. I highly recommend this engaging family saga.

I am often drawn to stories that explore the intricate, often messy relationships between parents and children. So, when I picked up "Real Americans" by Rachel Khong, I was excited to dive into the multi-generational tale. But as I flipped through its pages, I found it hard to connect with the story.

The book is structured around what feels like three separate stories, each focusing on a different character within the same family. At first, I thought this approach was interesting; however, just as I started to connect with one character's perspective, the narrative would move on to someone else. This disruption made it hard for me to stay emotionally invested.

Don’t get me wrong—Khong has a talent for creating relatable characters, each dealing with its own set of challenges. And there’s a lot to appreciate about the storytelling. Khong has a knack for capturing the small, everyday moments that make family life both beautiful and frustrating. But the book tries to tackle so many heavy themes—identity, belonging, generational conflicts—that it ends up only scratching the surface.

Despite my frustrations, I did enjoy aspects of "Real Americans." I see a lot of potential in Khong’s writing. If you enjoy a broader, more fragmented look at family dynamics, this book might resonate with you. As for me, I’ll be keeping an eye on Rachel Khong, hopeful that her next story will fully capture my attention.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advanced readers copy in exchange for a thoughtful and honest review.

This book was incredible. I loved the characters, the writing, and the fast pacing. Was unable to put it down!

I love this book, I love the conversations this book has led to, and I know I’ll love the way this book sticks with me for a while. REAL AMERICANS is an expansive novel of decades, of themes, and of style of prose, but also gives us the intimacy of everyday life for each of our protagonists. It’s broken up in to three sections, each from the perspective of a different generation of one family. Khong did a beautiful job giving each section its own unique voice and perspective, and handling time jumps in ways that propel the plot forward and act as a tangible representation of the way the characters experience time- toying with zoomed-in pauses and a metaphorical fast forward/rewind button. I loved how a lot of the character development happened through reading the stories of the other generations. I wish I had more time and pages to explore some of the themes with more depth, but perhaps the greatest achievement of this book is just that; Khong took deep themes and hard topics and made them digestible for any audience. This would be an absolute hit for book clubs- there’s something in it for every type of reader (truly this book spans like 7 different genres), and there is so much to discuss.

This is the story of 3 generations of the Chen family. At 22, Lily is working as an unpaid intern, when she attends a company event and meets Matt. They instantly hit it off, but Matt hides the fact that he is part of a very wealthy family. After they marry and have a child, Nick, through IVF, Lily realizes that her family and Matt's family have a history. Lily has moments where she realizes that she can stop time. She doesn't understand this phenomena until much later.
Part 2 of the book is Nick's story as a young man. Part 3 is May's story - Lily's mom, a geneticist, who details life in Mao's China. We learn what May did, which affected her daughter and her grandson, which caused a great rift in the family.
Interesting story with a small bit of fantasy.

Three stories of a family-daughter, son, and grandmother. Each story told separately but related. Relationships are strained when genetics are tampered with in a pregnancy.

Such an interesting concept! How far is too far when science tries to trump nature? To eradicate disease? To minimize genetic defects and magnify the good?

Nick Chen is a teenager considering college options and wants to explore life outside the island off the coast of Washington where he has grown up with his mom. The topic of his dad is off limits - the who, the what, the where. Nick decides it is time to find out. And the secrets that are uncovered are explosive!

Thoroughly enjoyed this book.

I absolutely loved Rachel Khong's debut novel, so I had very high expectations for her follow up. And I am so happy that Real Americans lived up to my built up expectations. This books is so different from Goodbye, Vitamin in terms of narrative and structure--but both have so much heart in terms of complex familial relationships. I typically enjoy when books do a narrative style where we follow one character for a chunk of the book, then move on to a different character (as opposed to switching POVs every chapter). This style worked really well for this story and the way Rachel Khong revealed the story. I loved each of the characters and really loved and suffered with each of them. I also enjoyed the commentary on motherhood, fertility, and the science of genetics (very Gattaca-esque)--especially as someone who has done IVF. Highly recommend this book and cannot wait for her next one!

Confession: I started reading this. Couldn’t get into it. Had to keep restarting it. And then the audiobook came out and I thought— One more go at it. And away we went. I listened to about two hours of it before I went back to my
Kindle where I have been reading!. What an addicting binge read. I can’t say I love Lilly as much as I wanted to. She’s just not my vibe with the moodiness and all of that, but I couldn’t quit reading this one.

Being half of a totally different culture from who you knew growing up… And what you look like is a weird existence that I am way too familiar with. This one hits home and I officially take back my half assed review and give this one a huge awkward five stars.

I was eager to read this after devouring Goodbye, Vitamin, and though these two books are very different, I nevertheless enjoyed Real Americans.

The book is divided into three parts, and I admit to enjoying the first two much more than the last — there’s something about mother-daughter relationships that just don’t work for me and I think that was at play here. In spite of this, Khong’s excellent writing carried me through to the end, and I will be sitting with the themes of this book for awhile.

Real Americans is, quite simply, as good as everyone says. Rachel Khong weaves the story of Lily Chen, a Chinese-American woman coming into her own as a first-generation child of immigrants; her son, growing up multiracial but passing as white; and her mother, an immigrant and scientist who desire to make the best possible life for her child and grandchild cause deep and painful rifts in her family. This is a story that takes on an almost impossible amount – exploring identity, ambition, family ties, privilege and the morality of genetic editing (so, you know, a few light topics!) – and just about pulls off pulling it together. Some of what Lily’s mom is up to and how that affects her family didn’t quite land for me, but I still found the result to be an impressive feat of storytelling.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Real Americans is a multigenerational tale that demonstrates how deep trauma can run through families and how much the choices of parents can affect a child. In the first section of the book, from Lily's perspective, I had so many questions. In Nick's section I was deeply affected and concerned by his emotions. In May's section, my questions were answered but the emotions only heightened. Theirs is a family that so clearly holds love for each other but has a hard time expressing it in healthy ways, which I think almost everyone can relate to in some way or another.

I was very intrigued by the science-fiction-y element of the "time stops" and how they came to be in their family and wish there had been more discussion of it. I also felt like the book ended rather abruptly but understand that as a stylistic choice! I did enjoy the book thoroughly.

This was a fantastic book! I loved how the book was structured with the three POVs, and it wove together perfectly in the end as to why they were in the order that they were. The story explores what it means to be an American, including wealth, class, privilege and race, and the author handled these difficult subjects beautifully. I loved the science aspect of the book. I'll definitely be thinking about this one for awhile.

"But most people in America, those who are fed and clothed and housed, can choose what to care about. From your comfortable position you can decide if you want to know about people in Syria or Myanmar, with the flip of a television switch."

This was tragic, but in a good way. It was a little jarring to be pulled out of Lily and Matthew's storyline and into someone else's, but overall it was a great experience.

I was just telling a couple people that I’ve read a lot of good books in 2024, but not many great books. That recently changed when I finished Real Americans by Rachel Khong, which blew me away!

“How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?”

This character-driven family drama covers three generations and is told in such a unique way that I was captivated the entire time. Real Americans won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I personally loved the family dynamics and how different choices can have rippling effects across time. There was also a minor examination into genetics and the ethics surrounding genetic experimentation that I found absolutely fascinating!

Even after finishing this book a week ago, I’m still wondering what it means to be a “real” American. More so, how much of our lives are predetermined by our familial past versus our own ability to shape our future? This was a complex book with lots of great discussion topics to pore over!

Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher (Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor) for this advanced copy!

The influence of parenting weighs heavily in this book. May, Lily, her daughter and Nick, Lily’s son all have a story to tell and each has been imprinted with their upbringing and parental desire for them. Lily’s story is first. She is drifting in life. Next is Nick and he is socially inept and was overly controlled by Lily. Last is May, a story of life under belligerent brothers, a mousy mother, and the im[act of Mao Tsetung in China. Both mothers are driven to let their children make their own choices but in reality, stifle them.
A very interesting novel.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.