I was really impressed with the beautiful art. The story seemed a bit messy at first but upon further reading, it got better. I enjoyed learning about Vietnam during this period of history. I also enjoyed learning some things about their culture too. It was very interesting. Would recommend this to anyone who likes memoirs.

Book Review:

I was really excited to read The Best We Could Do after reading other graphic memoirs in the same vein. The Best We Could Do definitely lived up to the hype surrounding it as well as other memoirs surrounding similar topics. It's emotional, interesting and definitely worth the read.

For me, a graphic novel has to do three things, have great artwork, have a great story and have great writing and The Best We Could Do has all three. The story captivated me detailing Bui life from Vietnam to America. It details the struggles that they have in America especially when it comes to parenthood as well as detailing her struggle of coming to America. I enjoy reading books like this as they show me how much privilege I have and the struggles of others. I hope that by reading more books like this it will benefit me and allow these stories to be heard.

I also really enjoyed the writing of the story and how it was told. Obviously, a graphic novel format is different from a typical novel but I think that this worked perfectly for this memoir. Bui's writing is great and gets across the struggles that she had. It makes it so much more real and thus more personal to read about. You get a feel for her struggle and people can feel for the story at hand.

I also really enjoy the artwork. It has a more ethnic style that is kind of rough around the edges but I really like this style as it shows that it is more real and is not as polished. I don't know I just really like it and it does add to the book at hand.

The Verdict:

The Best We Could Do is a great graphic memoir that is sweet and emotional which is all the best parts of a book.

I was completely in love with this story and the art in which it was told through. It was a truly eye opening read that encompassed Bui's family escaping a falling South Vietnam.
It was a completely unique side of the story for me at least too. I read the book in one sitting as I became mesmerized by the incredibly important story told. There are
no better words to explain the story than the actual story itself so I highly highly recommend reading it!

I ended up losing interest on this book and at this point I don't think I'll read it

Thank you to NetGalley, ABRAMS, Abrams ComicArts, and Thi Bui for the advanced preview copy of The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir --


This book looked interesting and poignant when I was looking at the cover and reading the synopsis, but I never expected to be as heart-deep involved in this book as I ended up by the end of it. This book shows, in every deep and subtle way, all the fifteen years worth of gestation and research that went in it, and it will pull you into every piece of itself.

This graphic novel, in sweeping water colors that seep right into your heart, is an illustrated memoir of the author's mother (while she's still living, a feat of bravery and dedication). This book works tirelessly to show you the divides and seamlessness that exist in families of refugees in new countries, how some generations are trapped half in the past (from where they lived/fled), and the next generation is also (but instead, they are half trapped by the world that wasn't quite theirs, but is their parents, while being raised fully in the new one, which is to them normal).

I would advise everyone to read this book, and I can definitely already say I'll be picking up a copy for myself and a few others as gifts.

In 1978, Bui's parents fled South Vietnam with their four children; one not yet even born. In 2002, Bui is still grappling with the events which her family experienced leading up to their escape and continuing to follow them through their lives in the United States. These events drove a wedge between child and parent. Then, as Bui begins to embark on her own journey of motherhood she seeks to close the gap between herself and her parents. By asking questions and learning the history of her parents and their experiences, Bui begins to understand.

Masterfully, Bui combines three-generations of family stories with Vietnamese history and distills these ideas into small illustrated panels. With a simple watercolor palette dominated in oranges, the graphic style reminds me of Jillian Tamaki's This One Summer. Simple illustrations capture both quiet and loud moments coupled with varying intensities of color to provide depth and power. This is at once both escapist and terrifying as we see all these conflicting images of present and past, home and work, peace and war, all depicted in a similar fashion.

Unfortunately, I feel like this also allowed me to step away from the true emotion of the story. It felt almost cinematographic watching this story unfold. It also could have been the way Bui wrote the tale-- after all, her family is still alive to read this memoir. Perhaps my separate also incurred from her inability to get too detailed and raw with the story. After all, it can be challenging to show people how you really view them in such a public light.

The Best We Could Do comes highly recommended to anyone who is interested in more #OwnVoices immigrant tales, graphic memoirs, or those looking to deepen an understanding of their own familial relationships.

A lovely, haunted memoir from a woman who escaped Vietnam with her family as a child.

A REVIEW COPY OF THIS BOOK WAS PROVIDED BY THE PUBLISHER IN EXCHANGE FOR A FAIR AND HONEST REVIEW.

Title: The Best We Could Do
Author: Thi Bui
Release Date: March 7, 2017
Publisher: Abrams Books
Review Spoilers: Low

One of the most poignant and moving graphic novel biographies I’ve read in a long time, The Best We Could Do is a wonderfully timely book that tells a very important story. With the kind of controversy surrounding immigration and refugees in America today, we see a lot of people forgetting that there’s a reason people leave their homes to come here. Far too often we’re seeing people let themselves buy into fear and stereotypes without any show of compassion for those trying to make a better life in the United States. The Best We Could Do is a graphic novel that humanizes the plight of refugees through the author’s own experiences.

In The Best We Could Do, artist Thi Bui tells the story of her own family’s escape from Vietnam in the wake of the Vietnam War and their struggle to integrate into American society. While the book is subtitled “An Illustrated Memoir,” it’s hardly Thi Bui’s story alone.

Much of the book focuses on Thi Bui’s parents and their history in Vietnam well before she and her siblings are ever born. She shows us how their lives and their childhoods before everything is irreversibly changed by war. We see how they came to their decision to flee to the United States with their young children in tow and the hardship and heartache that comes with it.

Thi Bui tells her family’s story with an open honesty that refuses to gloss over the darker moments in her parents’ backgrounds or her own family’s experiences. The book jumps around at times from her own childhood to her parents’ youth. Through a series of ten chapters her story shifts through time periods and events trying to make sense of the circumstances that brought her parents and her family to where they are now. One moment she’ll be remember her own youth, then the next she’ll be discussing how hard it was to coax out her father’s history from him.

Part of her insistency on telling this story comes from her own journey into motherhood. On the first page of The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui is in labor giving birth to her son. Throughout the book she struggles with the enormity of what it means to be a parent and she frames that struggle through this journey toward understanding her own parents and the sacrifices they’ve made.

I loved The Best We Could Do for so many reasons. I loved the honesty and Thi Bui’s growing understanding of her parents and their sacrifices. There’s a real bravery in her storytelling because it can’t be easy to lay out your own story and your family’s history for strangers in this way. And yet it’s an incredible book that brings a real human face not just to her own family’s experience but the experience of refugee families everywhere. Besides that, the artwork that accompanies the story is absolutely gorgeous. She does so much with just shades of red alongside black and white images.

The Best We Could Do is a beautifully book together book that I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys non-fiction graphic novels. If you’re going to read it, you may want to utilize this very handy pronunciation guide provided by Abrams books that helps readers understand the true pronunciations of the words used by the Vietnamese characters in the book. And you should read it. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more moving, emotional graphic novel about family this year.

I received this arc from Netgalley for an honest review.
This is the story of a family's escape from Vietnam. I purchased a copy in the wake of the immigration strife and decisions being made in this country. While most kids will never know what it is like, I hope that this book creates some empathy towards those who have or will attempt to.

An emotional journey of a family's oppression in a war torn Vietnam to life in America. #GraphicNovel #memoir #TheBestWeCouldDo

This was my first graphic novel, so it took me a while to adjust to the reading format. However, I thought it was beautifully and powerfully illustrated and was an incredible story of family, love and the importance of finding your place in the world.

A nice graphic novel to read. I liked it. Would recommend it.

This book had a beautiful story and even more beautiful illustrations. Was pleasantly surprised

This Bui did a fantastic job at telling her story. As I was reading this book, I felt empathetic for Thi and her family. For many people who don't know what it's like to have to immigrate from your own country just to be able to keep your family safe, this book will definitely make you feel a lot more than those who know what this is like. The way the story was told was beautiful, and I couldn't keep my eyes off of the page. If you are interested in reading about Thi's experience, I highly suggest you get yourself a copy of this book.

This #illustratedmemoir sheds a deeply personal light on not only one Vietnamese families experience but also on complex, divisive, invaded and war torn region. Having just spent 4 months in SE Asia, I dove back into studying the history of #laos🇱🇦 #vietnam🇻🇳 #cambodia🇰🇭 #thailand🇹🇭 but it is through deeply revealing narratives like #thibui that I grasp any real sense of the plight, experience and anguish of the people at its very core.

I started this graphic novel, maybe got 1/4 of the length in but unfortunately my arc expired before I had the chance to finish flipping through the pages of this what seems like beautiful exploration of a life.

This isn't really a graphic novel, but kind of an illustrated memoir. It is not a fictional story with magic or monsters; instead, it discusses so many different aspects of life, growing up in different places during different times, and being a family.

BestWeCouldDoCover
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui - eBook (Review Copy), 330 pages - Published March 7th 2017 by Abrams
The events are not recollected chronologically, jumping from the birth of the author's child back to the childhood of each of her parents, and then all the way back through to the present. There are dates and locations noted throughout, but I did get a tiny bit lost on occasion. (If I'm honest, though, I didn't actually read the date on half the pages so it's kinda my own fault.)

There are several key themes and events in this novel. One huge factor is war; how it affected the family and their life together. There's also a lot about what it means to be family, what motherhood is and what childhood is, and also the loss of a loved one. Another massively important theme is immigration; Bui describes being a refugee, illegally sailing away from Vietnam after they surrendered, and trying to build a life as a family in a whole new country. So many people are ignorant of these issues and hardships, not realising how much some families go through just to taste happiness.

The colour scheme is rather clear - oranges and blues, mostly. It has a very watercolour-y effect, giving a sense of remembrance and recollection of the past. The art is really lovely in this - I feel it portrays the story fantastically, and is just beautiful to look at on its own.

I found it really interesting how Thi Bui focused so much on the lives of her parents before they met, emphasising how even parents are people with their own lives and pasts and problems. As she becomes a parent herself, she realises how her mother must have felt for all these years.

As someone with a pretty "boring" life, I was also really intrigued by the journey everyone in this book made. The migration to America, trying to build a life and earn money and keep safe - it was a pretty emotional journey! But Bui never dwells on these negatives, never moans or wishes for change. She just says everything as it is, which I really admire.

This is a really interesting read for anyone who likes history, learning about different cultures, or just wants to appreciate their family more. It discusses some huge issues - miscarriage, infant fatalities, immigration, war - that a lot of people could benefit from reading about. And the art is wonderful! 4 stars for this novel.

I requested this graphic memoir as I read a few of them last year and wanted to make sure I read more this year. This sounded interesting so I was pleased when I was approved.

I was expecting a graphic about a family’s experience of fleeing Vietnam to America and, whilst this book is about that, it’s also about so much more. It’s about three generations of a family and how their lives have been, how one generation affects the next. It looks at how it feels to be other, to move to a different country and feel that their ways are slowly changing you to be more like them. The way Ma looks out and sees all the streets around their house are named after American Presidents and feels it’s turning her more American and on the next page talks about a school shooting – I could feel how small and scared she felt.

This book is also very much about loss – not just loss of where you’re from, your culture, but also the loss of babies and that really got to me. The way the novel opens with a baby being born and then the reader is taken back over all the babies that Thi’s parents had, including the baby that died. It’s heartbreaking.

The baby being born as the book begins is a new grandchild for Ma, and she can’t bear being in the room with her daughter as she gives birth and her reason is that it brings the pain back. At first it seemed strange that she had given birth so many times and now couldn’t help her daughter, but then it dawns on you that the pain she can’t face, and the memories coming back are the ones of loss, the heartache – not just of her babies but of her homeland, and all the things she’s lost or had to leave behind in her life.

The book still resonates with the world we live in now, the way the family moved to San Diego from Vietnam to make a life for themselves but aren’t welcomed by everyone in the port city as people are still raw from what happened during the Vietnam war. The woman feels other, outcast, different. The family struggle to fit in, to make a life in America. The children feel the frustration of their father but are too young to understand where it comes from. They can’t comprehend the disappointment of their dad’s life – the way he has come to America to make a better life and now all he worked for in Vietnam, his degree etc, are worthless and unrecognised and so he comes to feel worthless and invisible.

This graphic memoir looks at the way political changes have a direct affect on the people who love there; it really highlights how the political is made personal. It also really makes you think about the way we see a photo and are led to believe that it’s the whole story but for the people involved, the people who live in a war-torn country it doesn’t show context or the whole story.

‘I had no idea that the terror I felt was only the long shadow of his own…’

The book is about how the pain from one generation is revisited on the next. It’s about how we have to understand what came before, what happened to our parents and grandparents to grasp how they came to be how they are. It’s about finding tolerance and peace with the bad that has been done to us.

There is a lot of heartache in this memoir. It really brings home how everyone has their own story, and how an event that may have led to the best time of your life could have been the thing that took someone else away from what made them happy. It really gives you something to think about, the way that one decision can change everything and you can’t go back. When Ma and Bo met it was the best thing that happened to him, but for Ma, it took her away from her studies and she grew to resent that. Ma fell pregnant before marriage, so circumstance dictated that she marry Bo and she duly did, but then the baby died and Ma was already trapped in this marriage.

When Thi’s family finally, after so much planning and hardship, get to leave Vietnam it is on a crowded boat in the dead of night, they had no way of knowing what awaited them on the journey or whether they’d even make it. Ma was heavily pregnant at the time. It must have been terrifying – and it really made me think of the images we see on the news now of desperate people fleeing war-torn countries – knowing they risk their lives in cramped boats but also knowing that they can’t stay in their home land another day.

It was incredibly affecting when I read about what Thi refers to as the ‘refugee reflex’. The way that in a new country there is so much to learn but the biggest lesson she learnt as a child was to know where the folder of important documents was at all times, and to make sure you grab it in the event of leaving home in any kind of an emergency. To learn that when so young and to have that reflex stay with you, it’s heartbreaking to thing of living with that fear even when you have finally reached a place of safety.

The memoir gradually brings you back to the present day, where Thi has given birth in the hospital and it leads her to reflect on her relationship with her parents. She ponders on that moment when you realise that you’re not the centre of the universe, and that you can’t keep hanging on to resentment about your parents not being who you thought they were, or who you wanted them to be. People are who they are and Thi realises that you have to be okay with that. It becomes a little existential at the end as Thi wonders at the way we’re all joined to those who came before us, and I found this incredibly moving and humbling.

The images in this novel are so striking, they really fit the story being told and add to its impact. The colour palette is very muted with just black and white with an orange wash that is used in various ways throughout. It really is beautiful to look at.

I highly recommend reading this memoir. It’s one of those books that really stays with you for a long time after reading.

I received a copy of this book from the Abrams via NetGalley one exchange for an honest review.

The Best We Could Do is a thought provoking account of the author trying to come to terms with her own family history as she begins her journey of creating her own family. As a new mother, Bui starts to contemplate her parents' lives and what events led them to their current situation. She wonders why her relationship with her mother and father is distant and at times cold. The narrative then rewinds to the author's childhood in California and her desire to understand why her parents fled Vietnam in the 1970s.
While this graphic memoir is not unique as an immigrant story/experience, I really admired how Bui created the path of three generations and then shared their own aspirations, expectations, and their realities while also presenting a firsthand glimpse into the history of Vietnam from the point of view of its dwellers. To be frank, I did not know much of Vietnam besides what I learned from school about the Vietnam War and the French occupation so I really enjoyed this aspect of the graphic memoir. I also really enjoyed making the connections and the author's own insight of her past and culture to her parent's behavior. There are no heroes and villains in this story, but full three dimensional people who suffered heartache, famine, and poverty among other things in order to find a better future for their children in a new country. The Best We Could Do is a nice addition to the growing number of immigrant stories being told and would make a great book club discussion book.

HOLY MOTHER OF EVERYTHING.
This graphic novel/comic, whatever you wanna call it, is everything. Seriously.

The artwork was stunning. Seriously, the ARTWORK.
The writing was so engaging. The story itself. From the first page on until the very end, I just felt all the feelings that a person can have. I never had that with a graphic novel, but this one really went very deep and was just so real.

I highly recommend this story to everyone. No matter if you like graphic novels or not, no matter if you like non fiction or not. This book, this story is such an important one. And it's such an emotional ride. READ IT.