I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: There’s nothing quite like historical fiction for bringing the past vividly to life and showing events from a fresh perspective. And that’s exactly what Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai has done in Dust Child, creating a trilogy of interwoven stories about the tragic legacy of American GIs in Vietnam.

Told in dual timelines, the narrative opens in 1969 with teenage sisters Trang and Quŷnh, who make the difficult decision to move from the countryside to Sài Gòn, where they plan to work as bar hostesses so that they can send money home to their struggling parents.

Fast forward to 2016, and Viêt Nam Veteran Dan has returned to Sài Gòn with his wife Linda to try and lay to rest the ghosts of a war that continues to haunt him. What Linda doesn’t know is that Dan is also searching for the woman and child he left behind all those years ago. He desperately needs to make his peace.

Linking these two strands is the story of Amerasian Phong, the ‘dust child’ of a Black American GI and a Vietnamese woman. Abandoned as a baby, Phong has spent much of his life destitute, trying to trace his parents with the hope of starting a new life in the USA.

This was such an immersive, eye-opening read, beautifully told in lyrical prose that is not only searingly evocative of time and place but also digs deeply into the hearts and souls of the characters so that you cannot help but identify with their struggles, sacrifices and disappointments.

Much of the historical detail was new to me. And much of it I found profoundly shocking, especially the treatment of the thousands of mixed-race ‘dust’ children forced to carry the shame of their parentage. But it was also interesting to learn of the many programs set up long after the war ended — perhaps as a kind of restitution — to reunite Veterans with their Vietnamese offspring and to give Amerasian children the right to settle in America.

Immaculately researched and exquisitely delivered, a story that deserves to be told.

This story explores the aftermath of the Vietnam war on a “dust child”, the offspring of an American GI and a Vietnamese woman, many of whom were ostracised and treated as social outcasts after the war and a former soldier seeking to find the child that he had abandoned. The two perspectives make it interesting and compelling and there is food for thought in the description of how the children of American servicemen were subject to abuse and exploitation. Well researched and authentic in its portrayal of life both during and after the war.

With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy,

This book is about the Vietnam war and its legacy. It deals with the politics and consequences of getting involved in another country’s war and couldn’t be more relevant given the current international situation.

There are three story lines, which inevitably come together at the end of the book. The first one is set in Saigon at the end of the 1960s and revolves around two sisters, who left their village and home in order to earn money to support their elderly parents. The second tells us about the life experiences of Phong, the child of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier, one of so many Amerasians who faced discrimination and incredible challenges in post-war Vietnam. The third strand relates to an American couple, Linda and Dan, who visit Ho Chi Minh City in 2016 and return to the place where Dan served as an American soldier during the war in an attempt to deal with the ghosts that are still haunting him.

All three strands tell heart-breaking stories of the physical and mental damage inflicted on all the characters, but when the three story lines merge, the emphasis on guilt and blame shifts to healing, forgiveness and making amends.

I enjoyed reading this book and immersing myself in the lives of its protagonists - and although I felt that I had to suspend disbelief when it came to how the three stories related to each other, I gladly did so for a splendid reading experience.

I am grateful to NetGalley and Oneworld Publications for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a fictionalised history of several people’s stories, intertwined with each other, the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It is well-written and deeply-researched. The themes include sexual exploitation, racism and bullying, from a realistic rather than a “woke” perspective. Fear of the impending communist regime turns out to be worse than the reality, though no-one specifically targetted by the regime is likely to think so! All of Vietnam’s regimes, so far, have been authoritarian and one thing which an authoritarian or totalitarian regime does not normally do is crack down effectively on bullying, which makes bullying the key problem for most of the protagonists in this story. (Authoritarian regimes tend to be coalitions of the culpable which find themselves obliged to let their accomplices get away with stuff -and, of course, they then have to go on letting the bastards get away with stuff no matter how bad things get. Marshal Tito was the sole (and belated) proponent of socialist economic liberalism to survive the Soviet era largely because he was the only communist leader to run a tight-enough ship to be ABLE to change course.)

The author shows us what’s wrong with sexual exploitation by showing us all the other things the exploited ones knew how to do and how much happiness and prosperity was possible when they were able to do those things instead. And always, education and new skills, acquired throughout life and not just in childhood, are a better escape mechanism from poverty and exploitation than the panacea of a US Visa. The moral arguments against prostitution are essentially the same as Adam Smith’s economic arguments against slavery: the waste of resources is always a moral issue when the resources being wasted are human ones.

American servicemen are shown as treating Vietnamese women extremely badly and there’s plenty of historical evidence of that. It’s partly because they were so much younger on average than the men who’d fought the Second World War, but also because the only goal they were ever given was to complete their “tour” and go home. The absence of any published definition of success emphasised the lack of any extant strategy for achieving success and led to a lack of much, if any, sense of responsibility on the part of American soldiers to those they left behind in Vietnam when they achieved their goal of going home. Nothing they did was seen as making anything any worse; the author’s skill is to show us that, actually, it did make things worse.

Reading this book left me with a feeling of admiration for the Vietnamese who seem to have recovered from the Vietnam war rather better than their neighbours in Cambodia and Laos. And gratitude for the post war British leaders who saw Vietnam as a hot potato which, like Aden and Yemen, simply needed to be dropped. Which makes the sell-outs of their successors, Blair and Cameron, to the mindless White House incumbents of their day all the more galling.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting read. It transported me to a different time and country and was so poignant.

The characters were so beautifully written and I was invested in their story throughout.

Many thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for gifting me this arc in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

So I want to start by saying that Miss Saigon the musical is my all time favourite album. I listen to it at least once a week and I’ve seen the stage production twice. Like this book, Miss Saigon is based on a love story between an American GI and a Vietnamese bar girl, so as soon as I read the blurb of this book I knew it was the book I had been waiting for.
This book is told from different characters points of view and in different periods of time. We meet Trang/Kim a local Vietnamese country girl who heads to Saigon with her sister to work in the bars catering for the GIs. Earning money to send back to aging parents. Rather naively the girls think they are just going to be drinking tea and chatting with the soldiers, it soon becomes clear to them that to earn the big money they need to be doing more than just drinking Saigon tea.
We also meet a soldier named Dan and his wife Linda who are heading back to Vietnam years after the war to help Dan heal, however he has not told his wife about his full experience as a young GI during a horrific war.
And our last character is Phong, an illegitimate child now a grown man with his own family who was abandoned at an orphanage when he was a tiny baby, he has had a hard life being looked down as Bui Doi - the dust of life because of his parenting and he is searching for his American father.
The story alternates between the timelines and characters and to start with I found it quite hard to remember who was who. Especially as the names are written in Vietnamese. But once the characters had drawn me in I was with them. Feeling the love and the grief and the agony of these seemingly unconnected people.
I’m not going to write too much more because I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone, but I would thoroughly recommend this book as an insight into the lives affected by this war.
It is clear that the author has done a lot of research and should be commended for writing a story that sheds light on what happened for the people on the ground. The ones left behind in the fallout from the war.
I knocked of a star because for my liking there were too many sentences written in Vietnamese language which I felt did not add anything to the story and so I speed read over those parts. But all in all it was a solid 4 star read and I will still recommend to others.

The Dust Child of the title refers to all the children left behind in Vietnam after the war. Most are the product of brief relationships between young Vietnamese women and American soldiers - Amerasians.
As children, the Amerasians are looked down on by other Vietnamese children, and the challenges only increase as they get older. Viewed as unclean, they struggle to find work.
One story follows two Vietnamese sisters who move to Saigon to find work so they can send money back to their struggling parents. They end up in a bar/brothel used by American soldiers.
Another part of the story follows an Amerasian man who is trying to find his parents. Left at an orphanage as a young boy, he has had a hard life.
A third thread tells the story of an American soldier returning to Vietnam in an attempt to alleviate the PTSD he still suffers after many years, and find out whether the child he fathered while there survived.
A compelling story - well worth reading.

I was lucky to receive an ARC of this beautiful and poignant book. I enjoyed every word of it and raced through, although I often took breaks to Google search, learning alot in the process.

Set in Vietnam and flitting between the past (1969 during the war) and recent day (2016-2019), the legacy of war is explored through converging stories. This is a beautifully written, compelling, heartbreaking, moving story, steeped in history and full of suspense. I LOVED IT!!!

I have read some amazing books already this year and this one is my favourite so far

I have hesitated in writing this review because I wasn’t sure how to describe my feelings about the book. Parts of it were interesting and compelling, while others were simplistic and a bit off putting for me as a reader.

I thought much of the story of what happened to the bi-racial children born of relationships with Americans during the Vietnam war was incredibly interesting and valuable knowledge. However, there were many parts that I found written just too simplistically, to the point that some seemed almost “preachy”. It felt like the author was trying too hard to get a point across or had too strong an agenda that she let interfere with the flow of the story.

A few of the characters and their actions didn’t seem to ring true (notably the American wife, who was understandably negative and upset with her husband’s secretiveness at one point, then went to the other extreme without any clear path to change as the story progressed).

In the end, I enjoyed the story, despite the frustrations I had in reading it. I would like to give it 3.5 or 3.75 stars if I could.

A wonderfully written book looking at the horrors of war and the long shadow it casts over generations.

The story is told from the perspectives of the three main characters and this worked well giving us a rounded view of each character and their backgrounds and motivations. Well paced too, letting the connections and story unfold.

I really empathised with all of the characters - Trang looking to provide for her parents and Dan coming to terms with his actions while a soldier in Vietnam. And Phong simply looking for his father and his place in the world. All were complex and watching them deal with the challenges their situations presented , their hopes and the disappointments felt very real.

Obviously well researched as well as the author drawing on her own experience of working with reuniting families separated by the conflict. I felt as though I learned a lot too as I didn’t really know about those children of American GIs and how they are so badly treated. It was quite hard to read in places

Really evocative, bringing Vietnam and its rich culture to life - a truly captivating, thoughtful read.

"Phong had been looked down on by too many people, who had called him bui doi - a child of dust."

With two timelines, Dust Child highlights the time during the Vietnam War and its aftermath. There are three narratives, that are all interlinked.

Phong is an Amerasian - a dust child. He is the result of a black American soldier and a Vietnamese woman and he is abandoned at an orphanage at birth. Through the years, he is shunned, discriminated against and despised by society due to his 'different' appearance. He desperately dreams of moving to America to start a new life and find his birth father.

Due to their parents being heavily in debt, sisters Trang and Quynh move to the city to earn money. They become so-called bar girls and are forced to, "drink tea" with American soldiers. Trang ends up falling in love with helicopter pilot Dan.

Fast-forward to 2016, where Dan returns to Vietnam to confront his past and look for Trang, whom he knew only as Kim- the woman he abandoned after she told him that she was pregnant.

I was blown away by just how powerful this book was. The author has given an insight into the reality of war. In the author's notes, Nguyen Phan Que Mai writes about how Dust Child took seven years to write and how her characters' stories were inspired by real-life events. She has dedicated Dust Child to Amerasians born as a result the Vietnam War, "tens of thousands of children were born into relationships between American soldiers and Vietnamese women. Tragic circumstances separated most of these Amerasian children from their fathers, and later, their mothers. Many have not found each other again."

Dust Child is a love story, spanning 50 years, between an American helicopter pilot and a young Vietnamese girl. They meet in a Saigon bar, during the Vietnam war in the 1960s, where they share a genuine love affair. It is cut short when the pilot returns to America following the end of his posting.
50 years later he is back, with his wife, supposedly on a trip to finally lay the ghosts of his dreadful war experiences. But things don't go to plan and gradually we are drawn into the tragedy the girl and her family faced, post his leaving, in all it's messy reality.
Mai's writing sensitively depicts the gentle people and simple countryside life in Vietnam, even in wartime, and contrasts it with the cruel and heartless world experienced by naive country girls in Saigon, where they migrate, desperate for money, to work in bars for US dollars.
It is always enjoyable to read books that bring a different perspective to the reader and, Dust Child achieves this brilliantly. For sure, there are no winners in a war but sometimes consolation can be found.

Where to start with this review? A beautifully written, moving story set in Vietnam. This is not a country I have visited or know much about, other than the headline items relating to the Vietnam War.

This story gave me so much to think about. War is never easy and it makes ordinary people do terrible things and make terrible choices - the war in Vietnam was no different. This book uses those facts to tell a captivating story.

This book flicks between narrators and timelines as the gruesome choices made during a civil war and the outcome of those decisions is revealed. It was apparent from early on that the threads would weave together, but the ending left me breathless and astounded as how cleverly - and convincingly - everything was woven together.

So many issues are addressed; the innocence of youth, family ties and traditions, cultural norms and expectations, poverty, PTSD, a marriage based on half-truths, prostitution, addictions, children born out of wedlock, mixed-race children and discrimination, the after-math of war and the destruction left behind.

It was hard not to feel empathy for each and every character in this novel. Their situation was so often out of their control. This was a book I needed to finish, and it has really made me think deeply about all the issues I have already listed.

I wanted a journey when I read this book and was drawn to a setting I knew very little about. I was not disappointed and would recommend this to everyone. It is brutal in places and thought provoking, but all relating to areas which need to be addressed and considered. The ending is so unexpected and satisfying, but also felt real because not all issues are resolved. I cannot wait to see what this author writes next because she is definitely on my must-read list!

Not a period of history I know a lot about so I enjoyed learning more from reading this title. I did find it hard going at times and not an easy 'bedtime read'. I found Dan's character hard at some points in the book but appreciate that it was due to his PTSD and thus it was portrayed very accurately.

It has compelled me to find out more about the period and I would look for more by the author in the future.

A compelling, heartbreaking and beautifully written novel set during the Việt Nam war and the present day.
Easily one of my top reads this year!

TRIGGER WARNING: War, hunger, poverty, abandoned children.

The Mountains Sing is one of my favourite novels, so I was so excited to recieve an advanced reader copy of Dust Child.

I was drawn in by Phong’s story and then fascinated by the story of an American scarred by war and struggling with PTSD.

I love any storyline about sisters, and the sisters leaving home in 1969 to follow a friend who made lots of money in Saigon. They have a sad reason to do so: their parents have debts and lost their home.

The novel takes us from different parts of Vietnam to Saigon to Hollywood where the sisters end up entertaining American GIs in a bar.

The time period is 1969 to more recent times and we see the struggles of various groups of people. There are the Amerasian children and American fathers.

What I love is there is a real undercurrent theme of Vietnamese culture and ociety of the time period. It’s also great how we get to see the country in so much detail.

There is a real attention to detail that makes the story immediately emotional. This is what I like about the authors’ writing. The style can seem wordy at times, but Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai makes every word count so the story is still enjoyable.

Themes are love, loss tragedy moving on and making a new start as well as darker themes (war, hunger, poverty abandoned children).

The characters are always well formed, and their backstory is seamlessly woven into the overall plot of the novel. I was keen to find out what was going to happen to all of them.

As with the mountain thing, the pacing was quick and the book was overall enjoyable some very hard subject material and times.

Thanks to Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Algonquin Books for my eARC in exchange for an honest and voluntary review.

5 stars

I was pulled in right away! I didn’t want to put it down but also wanted to slow down so could savor the story. Beautiful writing once again from the author (I read and loved her debut last year). I’m a sucker for multiple timelines and POVs so this did not disappoint!

I also really liked the complex characters and their relationships. I learned a lot about pieces of history during/following the Vietnam War, which I always enjoy learning something new!

If you read this, grab tissues for last 25% 😭 I sobbed and was a wreck for the rest of the night and following day. This was a very hopeful and emotional read.

Fantastic novel that I loved even more than her debut! Will 100% be my favorite for the month and Quế Mai is officially an auto-buy author 💗 This will also be my next “book to push into everyone’s hands”/go to recommendation for the foreseeable future!

I received an advanced reading copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, OneWorld Publications and the author Nguyen Pahn Que Mai.
Fascinated by this period in history so was a little disappointed by the lack of context and detail in this book. Much more of a love story/romance than historical fiction.
For such an incredibly harrowing time, the plot lines and characters felt under-developed. Not for me, but would recommend for romance readers.

Thank you Netgalley and Oneworld Publications for this eCopy to review

Dust Child was a beautiful story, very interesting to learn more about the Vietnamese war from American and Vietnamese perspectives. I also liked how the bar girls were also included. It shows how war affects everyone and how the shadow of war stretches a long way into the future. I loved how most of the characters had their own viewpoints and how it had different timelines. This really allowed you to become immersed in the story and for them to be fully developed. I really felt Trang's pain.

Mai expertly depicts her characters and the scenery and descriptions of life in Vietnam are so real it is like being there. Truly a memorable reading experience and one that will stay with me for a long time to come.

Dust Child is a beautiful and heartbreaking novel about the Vietnam war, its aftermath, disruption and displacement, love and loss. We are transported to the present day, where we meet and learn Phong’s story, he is searching for information about his birth father and he has dreams for a better future for him and his family. In the USA, Dan, a war veteran, with his wife Linda travel to Vietnam for Dan to be able to put some of his ghosts to rest, to face what happened all those years ago. What Linda doesn’t know is that Dan is harbouring a secret, one he wants to put right on this trip.

In 1969, we follow sisters, Trang and Quỳnh as they leave their parents farm in rural Việt Nam and take jobs as tea girls in Sài Gòn serving american soldiers, we see how everything about them is tested and changes them, the decisions they are forced to make for survival. There is amazing depth to all these characters and I didn’t want to let them go at the end. This is a remarkable novel, wonderful and poetic, you’re in for a treat.