First, I must offer my appreciation to the publisher and Net Galley for the eARC of this book. This memoir shares a unique perspective exploring the experiences of an American-born child in a Vietnamese refugee family. While I was intrigued by the study of her mother’s death, I found the narrative to be somewhat self-important and unfortunately, boring. Despite its relatively short length, the pacing made it feel much longer, and I struggled to connect with the protagonist, Susan. Her character didn't resonate with me, and I hoped for a more compelling storyline beyond the themes of familial sacrifice and generational trauma. I was particularly moved when Susan faced motherhood, choosing what she wanted her child to call her. The heavy emphasis on spirituality and psychic elements isn’t for me. While I appreciate the theme of understanding parents as individuals, I felt it could have been conveyed more effectively. This book wasn't a good fit for me, and I don’t recommend it.

Susan Lieu, the daughter of immigrant parents, brings us a memoir looking into the power of family, grief, body image and loss. At a young age she loses her mother following a botched plastic surgery. Her large extended family never really talks about her mother again and especially not about what happened. Slowly, the family starts to grieve in their own separate ways. Susan perhaps visibly struggles the most. Not only with the loss of that relationship, but of missing out on knowing what her mother was like and the support her mother would have provided. It also navigates the perpetuation of cultural norms and trying to end toxic familial cycles.

I found Lieu’s story thoughtfully curated. She sets up the story when she’s young, with her earliest memories of her mother. We follow along as she loses her mother, moves to college, and begins a family of her own. Sometimes we flashback along the way to pivotal moments in her upbringing. Lieu’s upbringing is the polar opposite of my own. She grew up in a large extended family within very close proximity; I have a small close immediate family and I’m not really in touch with anyone in my extended family. Yet, despite the closeness of family, or in my case absence of, it was so easy to identify with the feelings of loneliness, the desire above all else to belong, and the struggle to figure out one’s own identity. Books like this remind me just how different yet similar we all are as human beings.

Thanks to Celadon Books for providing an ARC through NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Susan Lieu’s mother was a powerhouse. Her journey was remarkable. An ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, she was one of the ‘boat people’ fleeing to a refugee camp. Gaining entry to America, her college degree worthless, she grew a successful nail salon business. Her husband had his own trauma, orphaned and surviving war and their shared journey as refugees. She sponsored family who helped in the salon.

Susan was the youngest of the family, the only one born in America. All her life she struggled to juggle parental expectations and her own needs, dealing with mental health issues, and learning to disassociate from her own body, eating what her mother demanded while being criticized for her weight.

Susan’s mother died when she was eleven from complications of a tummy tuck performed by an unscrupulous doctor. Her entire family shut down any conversation about the death. But Susan needed to understand her mother and what had happened. She needed to find the affirmation that was missing from her childhood.

Her journey took her into a cult and to mediums and to Vietnam. She achieved her MBA to meet her father’s expectations, but left it behind to pursue her one woman show telling her story. But in the end, Susan found the enlightenment she sought and came to terms with her family and herself.

What emerges is an understanding of intergenerational trauma, how war and the refugee experience makes people hard and sealed off, and the way a woman’s self image impacts her view of her daughters and negatively forms their own self image.

Food is an important theme in the book, the center of family life and remembering their tradition and heritage.

“All the women were too ashamed of their bodies. If I really wanted to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma, I had to walk into the fire. It was time I stood up for myself,” Lieu writes.

Lieu discovered that we can change, that we can leave our trauma behind. That we can forgive by understanding the trauma others have experienced. It is all a part of growing up and becoming fully realized adults. “Change your thought, you can change your future,” a monk told Lieu.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

A transformational raw and honest personal account of an Asian American story. This was a story for behind the scenes and wake up call in family relationships. The dynamics were intriguing and the truth enlightening.

The Manicurist’s Daughter started as a story of woman trying to learn about her deceased mother and turned into a discovery of self. Through this amazing book, I learned more about Vietnamese culture and history than I could ever have learned in a classroom. Susan’s book details her parents terrifying journey from Communist Vietnam to the United States, how body image and food were deeply ingrained in her family history, how modern beauty standards and targeted advertising led to her mother’s early death, and how cultural norms prevented her from properly grieving her mother as a child. Overcoming these challenges through self exploration and humor, Susan’s book is a call to action for all woman to examine how the beauty industry unfairly preys on our vulnerabilities. It’s a warning to love ourselves, exactly as we are before it is too late.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for this advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

This was a great memoir on complex grief and search into the past. Susan was eleven when her mother died from a botched tummy tuck. Now as an adult she wants to understand her. There’s a lot to this story and a lot of emotion. Not only does it talk about body image and mental health, but looks into immigration and generational trauma. This memoir is very rich in culture, especially food!

“Seeking the truth was how I would avenge my mother’s death. I am the manicurist’s daughter, and this is our story.”

The Manicurist’s Daughter comes out 3/12.

This book showed how much Susan and her mother cared for each other. I loved how Susan learned more about her mom and the Vietnamese culture throughout the book. I also learned so much about beliefs, traditions, food, grief etc. I love when a book not only portrays a beautiful family (despite the circumstances) but also teaches me about something I dont know. Susan's mother died during plastic surgery and that was part of the healing journey for Susan as she uncovered some truths but also advocated for families that lost someone to malpractice. I appreciate that Susan wrote this memoir and I am honored to have had the chance to read it!

This is such a heartbreaking story in my opinion. It does shed light on another culture that I don’t know much about- how they live and grieve and find a way forward. I think it’s a good way to learn about another culture through the experiences of someone who lived it.

Thank you for the ARC for my honest review.

Susan Lieu has written a memoir about her life after the death of her mother. Her family immigrated to California after the Viet Nam War and had 2 family run nail salons. This book is rich in Vietnamese culture. Susan is trying to find out who her mother really was but she comes full circle and realizes who she is. It’s a beautifully written character driven emotional story.

This was such a beautifully written memoir of the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, the bond between daughter and a mother trying to make a better life for their family, and the dark consequences of beauty standards.

This memoir is so rich with Vietnamese food, culture and language. It is an in depth exploration into loss, love, grief, family, body shaming and mother daughter relationships. Susan struggles to come to terms with her mothers sudden death after a botched tummy tuck surgery. She searches to find answers surrounding her mothers death and struggles to connect to her family. She seeks spiritual advisors and psychics, travels to Vietnam to connect with her moms family and even creates a one woman show based on her experience. In the end she finds the love she was looking for all along within her family and becomes a mother herself. This was an unexpected surprise and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Manicurist's Daughter is a memoir written by Susan Lieu, a first generation Vietnamese-American woman whose mother and father fled communist Vietnam in the aftermath of the war. After establishing a home base in California, Susan's indefatigable mother Jennifer works to bring over members of her family. They share one home and all work in the very successful family business - a nail salon business with two locations. Life is chaotic and noisy until Jennifer decides to have a plastic surgery operation and very tragically dies at the age of 38 due to medical malpractice. This completely upends Susan's life and launches her on a quest to understand her enigmatic mother and the circumstances around her death.

The Manicurist's Daughter is a deeply emotional and personal story. Lieu struggled to come to terms with the loss and to find any common ground with her own family members. The impact of war and trauma had emotionally scarred her family, leaving them distant and unable to express emotion. This trauma was passed on to the younger generation as well, leaving Susan feeling isolated and alone in her own family. Years of body shaming and absorbing negative cultural beliefs around beauty also impacted the women in the family, and Susan in particular, who had been subjected to familial shame about her appetite and weight. The memoir explains Susan's journey to process all her feelings around her mother's death and her difficult family relationships.

I found this memoir a very challenging read. It was an interesting glimpse into another culture but it was not an easy read.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Manicurist’s Daughter
By: Susan Lieu
Genre: Memoir

✨ The Manicurist’s Daughter is a memoir of Susan Lieu’s life, mainly focused on the impact of her Vietnamese immigrant mother’s death from a tummy tuck when Susan was 11.

✨ This memoir explores difficult topics, including the death of a parent, navigating intergenerational trauma, PTSD, body shaming, societal/cultural beauty standards, family relationships, cultural identity / belonging, motherhood, and pursuing your own journey in life.

✨ We follow the authors journey to come to grips dealing with this unexpected loss, which includes doing everythingfrom joining a meditative cult, writing a one woman show, seeking answers from spiritualists & fortune tellers, embarking on a brief attempt at vengeance against the doctor who had killed her mother, and finally her path to motherhood and healing.

✨ I loved that I learned so much about Vietnamese families, culture and food while reading this. That aspect of Susan’s memoir was fascinating and I would lightly compare it to the memoir Educated because it immerses you in a family and world that is foreign (unless you were raised in a prepper family like in Educated or a nail salon owning family of Vietnamese immigrants like in this book).

✨ The author isn’t always a completely sympathetic character (ie making her family talk about the loss of her mother when they’re not comfortable doing so), but it reminds us how different people grieve and that family silence around grief is harmful, especially to children who need a way to process their feelings.

✨ As a now middle-aged woman (OOF), the desire to retain youth and consider plastic surgery resonated, but I appreciated this book because it brought to attention some of the kinds of doctors that can operate in that space and that we may see our own flaws more than anyone else does.

✨ In the end, I loved this memoir and thought that it was an emotional trek that is worth the read!

❓What is your cultural family background - and a favorite food / tradition you cherish from your culture?

**Thank you to NetGalley and Celadon books for my digital and physical review copies of this memoir!**

While this is outside my normal reading genre, I received this one through the mail from Celadon and later requested from NetGalley so I could alternate between digital and physical copies. I love being "pushed" outside of my reading comfort zones and this was a great memoir to explore other cultures and especially learn about the struggles that immigrants deal with on a regular basis.

I think this one would have had a higher rating for me if it was a little bit shorter. Again, memoirs aren't my go to read, but even so I found this to be a bit repetitive and drawn out. If The Manicurist's Daughter had been about 50 pages shorter I think I would have appreciated the reading experience a lot more.

Check this one out if you like memoirs, learning about other cultures, and emotional writing!

It takes a lot for me to continue reading a memoir with enthusiasm. I need to find something in there that speaks to me, that I can relate to, that I can appreciate. While this memoir was focusing on the rise and fall of the American dream for Lieu family, I considered this a memoir of a mother and daughter, whose behavior impacted each other deeply. It was a story of women who needed to find themselves.

I laughed it hard when Susan Lieu said USA was embedded in her name as the first born child in the US. I see how important it was for her family to establish that she was American. I love how these small details that no one would recognize were actually very well thought by an immigrant family. Susan was the first born in the US thus first major business in his country was named after her. Her family's hopes and dreams were embodied in her existence. But just like every young adult, she had other plans. She was a great student and got into Harvard (which would be success story every immigrant family wanted for themselves). However, her mother's untimely passing and her need for mother figure put her on a soul searching path (i.e., cult :D until she had enough).

Eventually she got to wear her mother's shoes. She became a mother herself and had a health scare that could have ended her life too. Then, she got to wear her father's shoes. She stepped back and saw how much her father cared about her. It was only that her father did not know to show his love. I really liked how no BS, very direct and raw this memoir was!

Whoa...talk about an emotional and raw memoir! This one is definitely that. As an Asian American, Vietnamese to be more specific, you read about Susan's life as a daughter of a manicurist. Susan tells you a bit about her parents' life before coming to America to live the American Dream. She takes you through her childhood, always working hard and helping her mom, dad, and aunts at the nail salon.

This book is also about Susan's journey to mourn the lost of her mother. Grief comes in many different stages and takes time to process. You read about how Susan tries her best to grief and remember her mom and how her grieving process is different from her siblings and her dad.

Finally going through the grieving process at a much later time, Susan has a different appreciation for the little things her parents have done for her and still do that once annoyed her when she was little. Everyone shows love in different ways and Susan does a complete 180. Instead of the anger she has from her mother's death, she finds appreciation and is able to heal from the past.

I really appreciate how the author wrote about her childhood. Growing up Asian American isn't always easy and you can truly see how much hard work her entire family has put into living the life in America. You can see and appreciate the little things that Susan appreciates. You definitely feel anger and heartbroken over the lost of her mom.

If I am completely honest I almost didn’t pick up this book to read it. Don’t get me wrong, the description was interesting and I love when a writer is willing to share so honestly their emotional journey. But since losing my own father a couple of years ago I am leery of stories about grief. Grief is sneaky and a life long process, so I try to avoid the things that I know will tear me up so badly. I’m glad I didn’t let that hesitation stop me from reading this book. Susan does an excellent job describing her process of grief. While I could relate to some aspects of her grief Susan’s experiences were vastly different than mine and I loved the glimpse into her life. Susan’s parents were immigrants to America and worked hard in the nail salons they owned. When Susan was 11 her mother died from complications from a tummy tuck. Being the youngest Susan had the least memories, but her family pushed moving on and working hard. Susan spent years working to process how she felt and trying to discover exactly who her mother was. There was a lot of rich Vietnamese culture and the descriptions of the food were amazing and left me hungry, This book is an emotional roller coaster. It is raw and brutally honest and I definitely recommend it.

I loved the Manicurist's Daughter—Susan Lieu takes the audience along as she works through the emotions of her mother's death, her family's silence around the death, and untangling the complicated relationship she's had with her body since childhood.

One thing I loved from Lieu is how unapologetic she was. Daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she brings us into her home, mixing in the Vietnamese language, food, and culture in with every chapter. To be honest, it took me a moment to get certain characters straight in my head because of similarities to names, but I feel like we would have lost the heart of the memoir if she tried to Americanize it.

I loved how she mixed in her childhood memories within the more present-day story rather than just having it be chronological. Given how grief is so messy and confusing, I felt like it really added to taking the reader along with her process of uncovering and working through her emotions.

Her writing was straight forward, which I always find works in memoirs rather than being too flower-y or overwrought with metaphors.

Though the book dragged just a bit, I really felt like Lieu shined in the last third of the memoir. You can tell this was the crux of the novel and she delivered on the emotions and the writing itself. I cried for the duration of this section and read it in one sitting.

The Manicurist's Daughter is a heavier read but Leiu wrote with such grace and clarity, that I had to give it five stars.

Reading 2024
Book 51: The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu

Saw this on a few most anticipated books of 2024 lists. #Netgalley had this one as a Read Now selection so I scooped it up for my Kindle.

Synopsis: An emotionally raw memoir about the crumbling of the American Dream and a daughter of refugees who searches for answers after her mother dies during plastic surgery.

Review: Manicurist’s Daughter was an intense look at family, tragedy, body image, immigrant experience, and life. It took me a while to get into the book, the chapters were long and I would fall asleep since I read my Kindle in bed. After I got settled into the groove of this memoir, it was really good. The month of February was a big memoir month for me for some reason. Again my rating for memoirs is something I base on my connection with the story. 4⭐️.

The Manicurist’s Daughter is a beautifully written memoir by Susan Lieu.

Susan Lieu’s family immigrated to the US from Vietnam in 1980s. Over the next few years her mother set up two successful nail salons and orchestrated their success. When Susan was eleven, her mother passed away from a botched tummy tuck surgery. After the funeral, nobody was allowed to talk about her what happened and to Susan, so much was a mystery.

Over the course of the next twenty years, Susan kept searching for the answers to her questions: why would the most perfect person in her life want to alter her body that way? Why will nobody tell her about her mother’s past in Vietnam? How did the surgeon who performed the procedure go on operating after her death.

As she tries to find answers to these questions, she’s also working through processing her own grief and her own life, especially as her father remarries and her mother’s family move out of their house. She’s not fully sure she’s going down the right path career wise and without knowing her mother’s story, you get the sense that she’s not fully whole without it.

The detail that Susan has allowed the reader to learn about her family feels so welcoming in this story. It feels like we’re right there with her, reading the depositions from her mother’s case and trying to get the answers she needs to find peace. I really liked this aspect of her story. It just felt so welcoming and open.

I really enjoyed this memoir.

Thank you to Netgalley and Celadon Books for this ARC in exchange for a honest review.