Graphic novel family memoir of a Vietnamese woman in America. The artwork is good – black inkwork, coloured by red and deep blue washes and no other colour, but I didn't click with the narrative enough, and think you'd have to have a certain interest in (or more knowledge of) Vietnam to really get much from this. It would also help to connect with this if you were a parent.

The Best We Could Do is an ambitious, engaging, and emotional memoir which tackles the complex history of Vietnam and immigration through the story of Thi Bui’s family. At turns a record of the complicated history of Bui’s family coming to America and a look at the complex relationship of children to their immigrant parents, the overarching story is about the search for a better and stable future while still dreaming of the promise of the past.

Bookended by the birth of Bui’s first child, The Best We Could Do traces her awakened desire to better understand her parents’ history, and by extension, her own. Bui looks at the expanse of her families history, from her parents childhoods through their life in American, with an unflinching gaze that empathically illustrates the realities of her family’s life and history. Since Bui’s point of view is always used to filter these stories, the portrait that emerges is also a reflection on how a person’s life impacts their decisions as a parent. Through her journey we come to understand the hardships of not only immigration, but of the chaos of growing up and having a family in a war torn state.

Skillfully illustrated, the artwork in Best is evocative and emotive. By putting readers firmly in the middle of the action, it adds a deeper dimension to the stories than they might have alone. When Bui writes of her father’s childhood experience hiding from French forces attacking his village, the reader experiences his isolation and fear along with him. Situation after situation, both harrowing and joyful, are shared this way.

Simply put, The Best We Could Do is a must read. At a time in US history where people have grown to question immigration and the humanity of immigrants, this memoir should be put into everyone’s hands. What better way is there to understand the motivation behind people who choose to immigrate and the kind of situations they face both in their home country and once they arrive in the United States?

I hate saying a book about war, about refugees, about trauma, was a quick read. It's like saying: Show me the worst parts of your life and I'll be through it in an hour or less. Sometimes I think I need a life for each sad book I read, to do it justice.

The Best We Could Do is sad. Not overwhelmingly so, but it's definitely not unicorns smiling rainbows. In a sense, it's about disappointments, little, large, and in between. It's the story of Bui's parents, of Bui and her family fleeing Vietnam, of resettling in California, of Bui becoming a mother. But a book of disappointments can end up as nothing other than a disappointment. It's only a teeny one: by the time we're getting into the groove, into the feeling of these people's lives, the book ends. Just stops cold. And some of the themes that I wanted explored more (in particular how Bui becoming a mother affects her view of her parents) aren't. The Best We Could Do skims the surface when I want to go deep.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui went on sale March 7, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book was incredibly graphic and raw, but I felt it would have been expressed more fully in a different format other than a graphic novel. I struggled to connect with and follow the story, but understood what the author was attempting with this book. However, given that my opinion is not the only valid opinion out there, I shared this with followers on Instagram and Twitter because I know some of my followers would love it!

The blurb about this book is right on, which I feel rarely happens. This is a touching memoir with beautiful illustrations. The author does a great job portraying the difficulties of family life, not just family life for an immigrant family. The book captures something universal about the complexities about family life and how our family history affects and shapes our lives. I also thought it was fascinating to get a glimpse of what people were experiencing in Vietnam around the time of the Vietnam war. I can see this book receiving a lot of positive attention when it is released.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Abrams ComicArts for providing me with an advanced reader copy.

When I saw this on Netgalley, I immediately wanted it. Not only do I want to read more graphic novels, I also want to read more non-fiction and diverse (+own voices) books. This graphic memoir combines all three into one spectacular book.

I think this is the type of (non fiction) book I would recommend to everyone. Here's why:

Because this is an illustrated memoir, it is very easy to read. It doesn't feel like you're trying to make your way through 2573365 different facts. You just don't get as overwhelmed by non fiction when it's in a graphic form.
It's a diverse and own voices book.
The art is absolutely stunning. It has this watercolor aspect to it that I found so gorgeous. It's all in the red-orange color you see on the cover. So the pages are black and white usually, with the red watercolor making its way through.
It taught me so much about Vietnam, from the perspective of both Thi Bui, and her parents and grandparents. I think that's really great, because she showed how each generation's view on the country is quite different.
Do you see why you need to read it too? It's well worth your time, I promise.

Like I mentioned before, this book taught me so much about Vietnam. As a Belgian, I'm sad to say that I had almost no prior knowledge of Vietnam? We don't really cover it in our history classes, so I didn't even have a basic knowledge to fall back on. That's why I find it so important to diversify my reading: I want to learn more about other cultures, countries, and people's experiences.

I have to say that this book felt very sad to me. Thi Bui's family has seen a lot of dark times, and it's not always easy to be the ones to survive either. What really struck me is when she said that she'd always have the refugee reflex: to always be able to flee/run with your important things much faster and calmer than other people would. Because you've been through it so many times. And that makes me so infinitely sad.

She doesn't shy away from addressing the hard topics, such as not getting along with family -and/or not understanding them. I feel like this memoir is her way of trying to understand her mom, dad and grandparents. It's her trying to understand the country she came from, but didn't really grow up in.

The only downside of this book is that I had to seriously pay attention to the timeline, or get confused. She sometimes goes back 20 years in time, then 30, then back to current times, etc. For example, she'd follow her dad's life, then her granddad's and suddenly we're back to them arriving in the U.S. Because I wasn't familiar with Vietnam's history, the "non-chronological" parts made it a bit hard to follow at times.

I'd honestly recommend this to everyone. It's touching. It's informative. It's sad, but also has hope. It's beautiful, thanks to the artwork. It's a story that deserves to be read.

Graphic memoirs are quickly becoming a favorite genre for me. This beautifully drawn volume is one of the reasons why. Thi Bui tells her immigration story along with her family's backstory of a life in Vietnam during the last century and the civil war and it's resolution in that country. The story is not sugar coated, but tinged with an honest portrayal of how parents communicate (or don't) with their children. This memoir is personal and intimate, but manages to impart a great deal of history about Vietnam and it's history told from a point of view that is not American. That alone makes this a necessary and worthwhile read. But the element of this book that makes it an absolute must read for me is the author's telling each of her parent's stories separately. Illustrating as well as her artwork that we each have our own stories, even if they sometimes overlap with someone else's. Highly recommended.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher via netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks!

A beautiful narrative about what it means to be an immigrant, a refugee, a woman, a child and a mother.

This was a truly amazing graphic memoir. The illustrations are beautifully drawn and the story powerfully written. Bui's observations are keen and honest. This is a story about the narratives that can shape an identity - motherhood, family, the immigrant experience, and what it is to grow up to become who you are. Highly recommended.

"The best we could do" is a graphic memoir about a family forced to leave their country in order to get a better life, searching for a better future. It's a graphic novel that talks about the war in Vietnam but, most of all, this is a story about family. It talks about the difficulties they face before and after the displacement: all the sacrifices; the struggle of finding their own identity, or understanding the meaning of home; all the things parents teach to their children, even if they don't do it on purpose.

It's a touching and important story, and I strongly recommend it to everybody, because it doesn't matter that the war this graphic novel talks about happened many years ago, the main subjet of "The best we could do" is unfortunately up to date.

At the beginning, it was a bit difficult to get into the story because it jumps a lot from the present to the past, but it's easy to understand everything when you get used to the style. Furthermore, the artwork is great and I love the colour palette that Thi Bui chose.

Excerpt from Review: "...The Best We Could Do is an emotional rollercoaster ride, filled with ups and downs as Thi uncovers more of her family’s past. Though there is a little jumping around in the graphic novel, the story is easily followed and quite enlightening. A great read!"

To give a proper review, I think it's important to put it out there that I am a second-generation Vietnamese-American. My parents were boat people - immigrants who escaped the Vietnam war on small fishing boats and came to America as refugees. I've grown up trying to bridge the gap between the amazingly privileged life I live and the sacrifices of my parents that made it possible. It may have been easier for me to connect and find meaning with this memoir of a similar Vietnamese immigrant family. Despite the closeness of many Vietnamese families, there also exists a disconnect. A constant misunderstanding that's caused by generational and cultural differences, but also something much more profound.

Thi's memoir is the same search for the cause of that disconnect. It's an exploration of her family history in an attempt to understand the two people that made her possible and what that means for who she is. Her stories were reminiscent of the ones I grew up hearing from my parents, haunting but also full of bravery and strength.

At times the writing read like a history book, the stories explanatory and sequential. Those were parts that I found difficult to get through. But there were also poetic moments that I felt perfectly explained an experience I was familiar with. I wish there had been less straight-forward narration and more storytelling with dialogue or more of those poetic moments. I loved the art-style though. That monochromatic orange tone throughout the whole book reminded me of the purple in This One Summer.

The inky brushstroke style was a fitting blend of American graphic novel and Vietnamese calligraphy. The images were fantastic. I'm not sure how this would read to someone from a different background, but for me it was nostalgic and poignant. For children of immigrants, this gorgeous graphic novel is an all too familiar journey in family and in identity.

The Best We Could Do An Illustrated Memoir is the first book by Thi Bui, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants.

Abrams Book will publish this wonderful, touching and very sad at treats graphic novel next March 7th.

Of course this book will let us reflect.

Thi Bui writes: "Our family is a boat family", because exactly as it happens now in various parts of the world, her family afforded to the USA with a boat and exactly as it happens now with immigration, the family of Thi left Vietnam because of very difficult social conditions.

Social conditions that couldn't permit anymore to live in the country in which her family was born.

I admit that I didn't know all the political story of Vietnam and the book is also in this sense very interesting and sad because this graphic novel through the personal stories of the various members of Thi Bui will live parallelally also the political story of the country with all its wars and divisions during the decades .

Emigration: what is this word? And why a person or a family decides to leave his/her country for searching for something better in another place?

Surely it is not a choice that it is done with light heart, I can tell you that.Our land has been a land of emigration during the 1950s and it still is.

It means to re-start from the beginning in a place where maybe you need to learn everything, including a new language. There will be other people and these people maybe will live you with hostility or with at first with a certain diffidence.
You will bring new customs and traditions and at the same time you must respect the laws of the country where you decide to go for a new living.
It's a sufferance. A sufferance and an adventure. Plenty of optimism, but surely if you leave a world devastated by war as it happened at the family of Thi Bui, your problems will be many, your heart will be hardest and heaviest than not the one of an individual who just wanted to try to better the life, without having experienced the tribulations and horrors seen and lived by the family of Thi Bui.

The separation of a person from his own land a sufferance that will remain for the first generations of emigrated as explain also Thi Bui in a passage that we will see later because you decide to break your root and to re-start, but you know for sure that your country, the life-style, the lessons you have learned and who you are and why you are as you are will follow you.

There is a moment in the book I love a lot. Thi explains many family tends to accumulate objects while they tend to live in a minimalism way. Once, while she was still little, the family was arrived from a while in the USA, close to their house there was a fire and Thi Bui run upstairs for saving an envelope. Just in case...In this envelope the most important and precious documents of her family:the green cards, social security cards. Their being Americans.


In 2005 Thi Bui has had a son and she asks in the book: "Do we live on in what we leave to our children?" I think so.
Children are our extensions once we won't be anymore alive. Our mirror, our reflection.



Thi Bui asks in another passage at the end of the book: "How much of ME is my own, and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined?"

The author thinks that being the children of parents who have seen the horror of war will always mean to feel in part the "weight of their past" although surely Thi Bui knows that she won't search anymore for another homeland because she is American and that Vietnam will always be genetically a part of her, but in a little little measure.
In the USA she has found the stability her parents were searching for them and their family.

Thi Bui is also worried for her son because she thinks maybe she can transmits him her sometimes pains and sufferance but when she looks at her son she sees a boy that is free.
Free to claim his future, free to become who wants to become, in a land of peace and in a land marked by that American Dream wanted so badly because real by all the immigrants who, for a reasons or another escaped from their lands, searching and dreaming for a better future and for peace and stability in the Land of Freedom and Opportunity.

Beautiful, truly moving, plenty of flashback, memories and intense. Highly recommended for understand and never forget the profound connection existing between past and present.





I thank NetGalley and ABRAMS Books for this book.

4.5 stars. An immersive, intimate, and beautiful graphic memoir. The book follows Thi's parents' childhoods and comings-of-age in Viet Nam, and then fleeing as refugees with their children to the US, interspersed with Thi's own experiences as a new mother and coming to terms with where her parents came from. The detailed and expressive artwork is a perfect complement to Thi's narrative voice. Wrenching, gorgeous, intensely personal, and strikingly engaging.

This was a very emotional, heart-wrenching but beautiful read. The illustrations worked worked beautifully with the story, and added so much to it. This is definitely a book I will recommend to many people.

The Best We Could Do continues the interesting and emotion-filled line of biographical comics that deal with leaving home countries, war, injustice and finding your own place and a better tomorrow. Thi Bui follows Satrapi and Kunwu and depicts us Vietnam, which we have never really known and not like this. It's her family's story to find a better life when Vietnam at that time could not do it. It's sad and hollow and full of hope. I love comics like this, since they show us the humane to conflicts and show us a world that no one but the ones who have to live through it knows. We learn so much by reading these and they are important pieces of history that would be otherwise lost. The structure of the comic could be better though, as it scatters slightly. I would've wanted some better resolution to Thi Bui's parents, since they were reduced to background noise even though they had an important role. With a resolution I mostly mean that This Bui could've analysed and portrayed their roles better.

The art is interesting and fits the theme well, even with the black-and-red hues that colors the sky with blood. The Asian look of the comic brings us closer to Vietnam in the same way Kunwu's comics do with China. Imagery is everything. Some of the panels are a bit dark and the backgrounds have been mostly reduced to black, which feels lazy - especially when the story is set in Vietnam. It would've been great to see how Vietnam at that time looked like more than what we now got. A tighter structure and better pacing would've earned this the fourth star easily, but the comic is still good and teaches us something new, which is always great.

I loved this! Great for fans of cultural graphic memoirs like Persepolis. The artwork is gorgeous as well.

I thought for most of the book that this would be a solid 4-star read, but the last twenty pages or so really brought all the threads together in such a poignant way that it elevated it another star for me. The author tackles her relationship with her parents, their personal histories, and the family's immigration from Vietnam to the US in the 70s all through the lens of becoming a mother herself. If you are interested in immigration stories, knowing more about Vietnam/the Vietnam War (I'm woefully ignorant on that subject), or graphic history in general you really need to read this book. Complex, heartbreaking, hopeful.