4.5 stars rounded up because the current political climate makes the content and themes of this work hit a little too close to home…

This book made me feel a very wide range of emotions from aggravation to concern, and in a way that speaks to the ambition here. One can say that, at times, it’s *over*-ambitious, given how rough some of the transitions between perspectives can feel (we follow at least five different-but-interconnected stories). From a technical perspective, the work might have benefited from minimizing these switches and instead focusing on two.

At any rate, this was a very thought-provoking read. My thanks to the author (Kevin Nguyen), the publisher (One World), and NetGalley for providing the eARC through which I was able to read the work and write this review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance reader's copy of this book. Unfortunately at this time I will be unable to give it my full attention, so I will provide a starred rating and return when I can give it a proper review.

Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan are cousins with bright futures. Ursula is a budding journalist, Alvin is an engineering intern for Google, Jen is a NYU freshman, and Duncan is on his high school football team. A series of violent attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions. Those in the camp are isolated from the world outside of it, and are forced to work jobs they hate. When Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside, she contacts Ursula. This is her opportunity to tell the world about the camp, as well as bolster her own career.

Based on the Japanese American internment during World War II, this book still deals with modern-day racism and immigration policy in America. It's easy to think what happened in the 40s doesn't affect today, but people are only too willing to ignore the atrocities done in that time period and recreate the circumstances that led to it happening in the first place. Mỹ is the Vietnamese word for American, but when it's not capitalized also means beautiful. Context is key in a monosyllabic and tonal language like Vietnamese.

In this story, the "cousins" are half-siblings scattered around the country by a Vietnamese father who essentially abandoned them all. We are introduced slowly to the four main characters, seeing the ties between them and family members, and seeing the family lore in the form of their paternal grandmother's stories. As half Vietnamese, Ursula is white passing and uses her mother's maiden name. Her brother Alvin isn't quite as white passing, but strings were pulled at Google so he avoided detention. Jen and Duncan weren't as lucky, with a Vietnamese American mother and no one bending rules for them. This tension and quiet horror of the situation is brought home by getting to know these four people directly affected. Interspersed are dry and impersonal sections, outlining the internment order, the capitalist drive to take advantage of the situation, and politicians downplaying the severity to control the narrative.

Throughout the internment, we see those who collaborate, those who fight in obvious ways, those who fight back in subtle ways. Some accepted the reality of the internment, merely surviving, and others eked out joy where they could. Yet others did suicide by cop. We're told that Camp Tacoma is the fancier and nicest of the camps, yet this still happens. It's a chilling look at the circumstances inside the camp, and the mental gymnastics of the everyday people who justify it. There's no right way to deal with trauma and how to deal with a situation like this. I hope that this book inspires conversations about people of different cultures, ethics, and how best to cross the divides between us.

This book is TIMELY. In an alternate timeline in which domestic terror attacks lead to Vietnamese people in the US being rounded up to internment camps, an extended Vietnamese family deals with some being sent to camps and some being able to stay out, and how they all deal with this.

You'd think this book would make you feel depressed and hopeless, but it oddly didn't do that for me. One theme that is focused on in one POV is assimilating into normalcy while at the internment camps, and finding purpose and contentment while there. I thought this was a super interesting topic to take on, especially with how people outside of the camps reacted to it.

I also loved the look at journalism ethics, and how someone can begin to believe that they are the sole creator of their success, not accounting for the cost of what others have given them, like information and help. Ursula, the journalist character, was at first the most intriguing and exciting character to me, but as the book went on, her change was brilliant. The affect of her change of her relationships were perfect to read.

A review can't do this book and its art justice, so I highly recommend you read it! In conclusion, I really liked it.

Thank to Netgalley and One World for the e-ARC!

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
---
WHAT'S MY DOCUMENTS ABOUT?
Soon after the fall of Saigon, but not soon enough, a woman named Bà Nội manages to escape Vietnam with her four-year-old son—she'd been able to send two of her children to the U.S. earlier. Sadly, her husband was unable to leave with them. As the novel opens in the mid-2010s, we meet four of this son's children—Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan.

These siblings and cousins are on the cusp of adulthood. Ursala is trying to make it as a journalist in NYC, Alvin is starting an internship (that will hopefully/likely turn into something more) at Google, Jen is enjoying the freedom that comes from being away from home at NYU, and Duncan's passion is playing on his high school football team—and he's pretty successful at it. All in all, this is a pretty good realization of Bà Nội's American Dream (even if most of the family had hoped for something more lucrative for Ursala than being a writer).

Then the U.S. is rocked by a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that result in the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese-Americans being placed in various internment camps. Jen, Duncan, and their mother are placed in Camp Tacoma, while Ursula and Alvin are able to get exemptions.

The novel traces the lives of these four (as well as some of their relatives) through this dark time—showing how technology, business, the media, the government, and prejudice collude to create and maintain this system, as well as the public reaction and eventual distraction (with sporadic moments of attention and protest). But beyond that, we see how those most impacted by these policies survive this—and how they try to adjust, cling to their humanity, and try to do more than survive.

THE COUSINS
First, I should note that we also get some time with their shared father (who was not really involved in their lives growing up), Dan. Without getting into it, Dan took a very different path than his children—or the majority of Vietnamese-Americans—during this time. His actions—which we check in on sporadically—serve to contrast what the rest go through.

But I want to focus on—as the book does—the cousins. These are fantastically drawn, deeply flawed, and relatable characters. They all react very differently to their circumstances, and grow (or at least develop) through them in ways that are completely believable. In much the same way that the fall of Saigon and escape to the U.S. shaped the lives and psyches of their grandmother and father, this period does that to them.

MORE THAN SURVIVAL
In the beginning—even for those outside the camps—it's just about survival. You do what you're told, you make sure to obey the men with guns, you keep your head down and just hold on to whatever you can. But in time, you find ways to breathe, to relax, to find community and support, you even find ways to help others.

The guards organize football games for the detainees, which are attended by most of those in the camp. It allows Duncan to thrive. Jen gets work on the camp's official newspaper—which, yes, is basically a propaganda machine (everyone knows this), but it helps her hone her writing and gets her exposure to most of the camp, as well as access. Because of her access, she's brought into the circle of a smuggling operation that brings in some forms of food, life-saving medicine that the camp won't bring in, and even digital copies of TV, movies, and music.

It's through these temporary escapes from their daily circumstances—authorized or not—that the detainees are able to remember that there's more to living than existing. There are flashes of joy and relief in the midst of their tense, precarious, and tragic circumstances.

It's in this part of the novel that the reader is able to find more than just a frighteningly possible dystopia; it's what elevates this.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT MY DOCUMENTS?
One of the more chilling aspects of this book is how most Americans move on from the internment. It makes headlines and creates some scandal for a bit, and then the attention of the public shifts to something else. Every now and then, something will come up that gets people riled up a little bit, but nothing sticks for most of the public. This is a dystopia—but not for everyone. Not that many people suffer. And while things could be better for people like Ursula and Alvin, outside of their own missteps and failings, their lives are pretty good.

The more I think about that, the more terrifying it is. The more realistic and possible it seems, too.

There's a moment toward the beginning of the book where Ursula is attending a lecture from a working journalist, who says that a good story tells us something about people—how they live and how they are self-deluded. It seemed like a pretty obvious spotlight on one of Nguyen's themes. And it happens so early, I don't feel bad getting that specific. Not only is that a good way to think about stories (true and fictional) in general—it's a key to this work.

Every person we spend extended time with—and several that we don't—are under one or more forms of delusion—some external, but many come from within. This, too, is Nguyen's realism shining forth. The way these four fool themselves is so relatable and so pitiable. It may sound like I'm criticizing the characters (and maybe I am a little), but this is a testimony to the way Nguyen depicts them, they come alive in their failings more than in their strengths.

I would've liked to see a little more of the relationship between Duncan and Alvin. But the way we—and they—were denied that is one of the stronger elements, the more I think about it. Once they're unable to communicate after the internment (which, naturally, comes with a total lack of mobile phone/internet access), they themselves think about the ways they missed out.

I do think some readers will be put off by how fun this book sometimes is. Jen has a similar thought when the underground starts distributing TV shows and people get so into them—but her smuggler acquaintance assures her that this is good. There's a little bit of enjoyment in these people's lives now—they're doing more than just existing.

Also, the moments of lightness do a great job of setting you up for the next gut-punch of a development. Nguyen's is good at lulling his readers into that.

This is a gripping, well-plotted read that keeps moving along, too. There's a momentum that slowly builds, almost like a thriller, until you're barreling toward the conclusion.

This is a powerful, haunting, uncomfortable (purposefully) read that will also charm you. I've been having a hard time moving on from this book in the days since I read it. I keep finding ways to talk about it or think about it—and the more I do either, the more I appreciate this work. This is definitely one of the best—both affective and effective—books I've read in some time.

This was my first book by Kevin Nguyen, and I'm so incredibly impressed with his writing. With how the world is looking, this novel felt so real and scary. I love all the different perspectives and feelings towards situations. This was such an amazing novel and I will definitely read more from Kevin Nguyen.

want to live inside this authors brain for a day. He writes the most realistically complex characters in asinine situations, and it’s so compellingly readable.

I want a sequel ten years down the road to learn where these siblings ended up.

Like Laila Lalami’s THE DREAM HOTEL, what makes MỸ DOCUMENTS so unsettling isn’t its detachment from reality, it’s how close it sits to real historical and ongoing events. Kevin Nguyen draws from the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WWII, the Vietnam War, and current immigration detention policies. The result is a version of America that’s devastatingly close to our own.

Within this framework, Nguyen offers sharp observations on modern life and the trials of early adulthood, further exacerbated by a society intent on crushing even the smallest flickers of hope or whimsy. It felt meaningful to witness how each of the characters tries to adapt to their new, dehumanising circumstances.

And yet, for its many strengths, I was missing something here. While the themes are poignant and the premise powerful, I struggled to connect emotionally with the characters. I never really felt like I knew them, especially Duncan and Alvin. One likes football, the other works at Google… and beyond that, I wasn’t quite sure who they were. That surface-level feeling extended to the story more broadly - I kept hoping for something deeper, more layered. There were several threads, like the Tower and some of the secondary characters, that could have added more texture if explored further.

Overall, Mỹ Documents is a sharp and timely novel that raises plenty of infuriating and important issues, I’m just not sure this particular telling will stay with me in the long run.

My documents was one of my most anticipated reads this month and I am still not quite sure how I feel about it. We have four Vietnamese American family members (Ursula, Alvin, Duncan, and Jen) who are facing bright futures-Ursula in journalism, Jen beginning university life, Duncan a star athlete, and Alvin a tech bro in the valley. However, a terrorist attack takes place in America linked to Vietnam and the country panics. Interment camps are established and Jen and Duncan are sent to one while Alvin and Ursula are on exemption. Through their separation, an examination of race, ethnocentrism, and privilege takes shape.

I enjoyed the political implications of the book-especially now as it feels very timely and relevant. I also liked the humor mixed in as well. However, there are times that the story didn’t feel complete-the terrorist attacks never felt fleshed out and the characters felt stock. An even reading experience overall-important message in many ways, brought down by what seemed to be incomplete. Plot points at times.

Thank to the publisher for providing an arc via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was clearly written before the recent *gestures broadly*, but it’s unfortunately way too timely, the dystopia it creates is far too feasible. Along with the commentary on internment camps which would and should make everyone uncomfortable, Nguyen uses the multiple POVs to paint a contrast on half-siblings that fall on the different side of the race coin. The characters are close in age, which serves well for the contrast but fell short in painting a broader picture. I think this was mostly well done, but it surprised me with the parts it focused on and the ones it didn’t. Parts of it felt too lighthearted and parts dark, and I think I would have liked it to lean on either side more. I still did enjoy this one and I’m glad to have read it. I also will be recommending this to anyone who is newer to the aforementioned topics because it definitely manages to paint a vivid picture. It also includes a perspective different than most stories do on what comes after and I really appreciated that.

(3.5, rounded up to 4)

Kevin Nguyen’s My Documents is a chillingly plausible dystopian novel that imagines the mass detention of Vietnamese Americans following a coordinated terrorist attack. The government’s sweeping response - pushing families into internment camps under the guise of national security - feels eerily rooted in both past and present American policies.

The story follows four young family members whose lives split along lines of race, privilege, and policy. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma, where they endure isolation, labor, and surveillance. Ursula and Alvin remain outside - spared, perhaps, by whiteness, corporate protection, or sheer chance. When Jen discovers a way to smuggle information out of the camp, Ursula seizes the opportunity to expose the conditions and elevate her own journalism career in the process.

I’ll be honest: I nearly didn’t finish this book. I put it down for months - the emotionally distant narration and uneven character development in the early chapters made it hard to connect. But picking it back up, I found that the novel’s slow burn pays off in moments of sharp political insight and uneasy emotional truth. The themes of institutionalized racism, media complicity, and the limits of ambition are resonant and thought-provoking, especially in our current climate.

My Documents isn’t an easy read, but it’s a timely and necessary one.

I am really struggling with my reaction to this book. The book is interesting and certainly seems within the imagination of the American government right now. The family, however, is constantly, casually, and carelessly cruel to each other. One of them benefits from this, but it is on the backs of the rest of the family. It made this a hard read for me and makes it difficult to recommend to others.

DNFed at 33%. I was looking forward to this one SO much, but felt let down by it. I ended up liking the eerily believable dystopian premise--a terrorist threat in the near future causes the US government to jump to round up Vietnamese Americans in interment camps reminiscent of those used to detain Japanese Americans during World War II--far more than the way in which Nguyen executed the idea.

This is very much a character-driven, and not a plot-driven, novel, and this is to the story's detriment. The first fifth or so of the novel jumps back and forth between the perspectives of our four main characters: Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan. Except that I found these opening chapters boring and unsuccessful in giving me a clear idea of what these characters are like. These character sketches feel flat. All I learned from the beginning was that Alvin is your typical new tech bro in the Valley; Duncan is an athlete who is self-conscious about his size; Jen is a university student trying to find a community with her school's Asian American crowd and yearning for Ursula's regard; and Ursula... Ursula was probably the most interesting, because we spent the most time with her, but she's still just a basic budding journalist trying to make it big with a good scoop. It wasn't enough for me to know them, nor to feel anything for them.

Then suddenly the pivotal event of the terrorist attacks happened, and the book seems to skip all the important details to land, belly-flop, in the middle of the detention camps. We don't learn the details of why the terrorist attacks happened. Why were Vietnamese (Americans?) attacking? Beyond for the internment order, how did the rest of society respond?

Then we get to the internment camps and details grow even fuzzier. Apparently the camps were hastily put together, but that still doesn't excuse the fact that I am unclear what they look like. In what part of the country are they located? What is the terrain like? How big is the camp and how many people are detained there? What is the layout of the buildings? Nguyen unfortunately skips over all of the world-building and instead chooses to linger on storylines that feel detached due to the trouble I had with envisioning the camps. We start hearing about all the contraband that's being smuggled into the camps. (But what was security even like, to enable this to happen?) There's a smuggling operation that apparently runs very smoothly. (Huh??)

So... yeah. I had trouble believing the world that Nguyen attempted to paint a picture of. Combined with my inability to know and understand the four main characters, and the result was that it was all too easy for me to put this book down and never come back to it again.

My Documents by Kevin Nguyen was a powerful, disturbing and oddly funny read.
I enjoyed the perspective and the way his writing just kept me glued to the pages.
An engaging, inspired story of real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War.

Nguyen presents an unsettling scenario that does not seem too removed from reality under the current administration. The novel opens with the strong matriarch who sacrificed everything, including leaving her behind husband, a university teacher, t get her family out of Viet Nam when Saigon fell. The novel then focuses on her four grandchildren: Ursula, a writer, who blogs about beauty products for a website when she wished to be a serious journalist; Alvin, an intern at Google; Jen, a needy and unassertive student at NYU who is six years younger than Ursula, but saw her as a role model; and Duncan, a highschool student who is shy and sweet. Although Ursula and Alvin were raised in Boston by a single white mother, Jen and Duncan were reared in the Midwest by a Vietnamese mother who was a devout Catholic. Each of these children, who refer to each other as “cousin” as a sign of respect, were united by being abandoned by their father, Dan, who had a tendency to start families and to leave them.

After presenting the principal characters, Nguyen reveals how they get caught up in a federal crackdown after a series of coordinated attacks on the busiest airports in America on one of the busiest travel days of the year — December 22 — after the perpetrators were identified as Vietnamese men. Legislation was forwarded, the American Advanced Protections Initiative, that suspended the rights of the Vietnamese Americans’ rights while the attacks were being investigated. The Vietnamese were incarcerated which was both similar in practice and policy to what was done to Japanese citizens during WWII (although Alvin surprisingly had been unaware of the mass evacuations of Japanese Americans during WWII).

Ursula, a journalist, and Alvin, a Google employee, are exempt from reporting to an assembly center, possibly because their mother is white and because of the machinations of Google to retain its workforce. Dan abandoned his wife, Celeste (who had no idea of Dan’s previous lives) and their two kids and takes off to elude the authorities. Jen and Duncan and their mother dutifully report to Camp Tacoma. Detention was boring, particularly because the detainees were deprived of access to information and the ability to communicate. Everyone at Camp Tacoma was forced to do manual labor. Jen wrote “morale booster” copy for the camp newspaper and Duncan worked in the kitchen and played on the football team. Because of her job, Jen could readily move about the camp, largely undetected. She is recruited by El Paquete, an underground organization, and hopes to reveal to Ursula the horrors of the camp – the suicides, the brutality, the lack of medical care.

Nguyen explores the realities of racism, but he throws in enough humor to leaven the weighty subject matter. He explains that detention was lucrative for corporations, writing that the Vietnamese flooded Amazon with orders before they were required to report for their incarceration assignments, but because of the unexpected volumes of sales, deliveries were delayed and the items were often left moldering on the porch as the buyers were already gone. He also throws jabs at the racists who run the government, quipping that some “Republican leaders had tried to sell [detainment] like it was a vacation – free room and board while matters of national security were sorted out.” Nguyen has crafted a rich and engrossing novel that seems prescient when just this week the Vice President used racist and derogatory language when discussing China. Thank you One World and Net Galley for an advanced copy of this compelling novel.

With Japanese internment during WWII and detention camps on the Texas-Mexico border, Kevin Nguyen had history to draw on as he decided to write a novel in which Homeland Security detains thousands of Vietnamese Americans following several bombings that might have been conducted by Vietnamese Americans despite definitive proof.

The story centers around several individuals. Readers first meet the characters before their internment with the main early focus on two “cousins” (in reality, half-sisters), Jen Nguyen and Ursula Carrington in New York City. it isn’t long before Jen, her brother Duncan, and their mother land in a detention center in an undisclosed desert location. Although Jen and Duncan, Ursula and Ursula’s brother Alvin share a Vietnamese American father, who is part of none of their lives, Ursula and Alvin have a white American mother, whose last name Ursula has adopted for her new journalism job with an online news site, enabling her to pass for white. Allvin, who looks more Vietnamese than his sister, escapes detention only through the intervention of Google, for whom he has just begun an engineering internship. A husband and a father of two small children, Dan drives away from home and family unannounced, going off the grid to escape incarceration but carrying documents long concealed in the trunk.

Author Kevin Nguyen alternates between these characters, portraying life in the detention camp, life working for Google and in the fashion section of the online news platform, and life on the run. As clandestine smuggling and publications arise in the internment camp and Jen becomes increasingly involved, she connects with Ursula, who is struggling to build her career, determined to move up from fashion to news. At Google, Alvin inadvertently stumbles across secret information during his internship, and character after character must make decisions that could improve or jeopardize their well-being, whether career or life itself.

Looming over the desert detention camp is an ominous tower, the purpose of which no one knows despite much speculation.
One brief chapter at a time, author Kevin Nguyen lets readers get to know his characters and builds suspense as characters adjust to and rebel against camp life or focus on building their outside careers and perhaps achieving fame. Throughout the novel, the title gradually assumes different meanings.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an advance reader egalley of this highly recommended and socio-politically relevant new novel from Kevin Nguyen.

This is a moving dystopian novel on Asian American culture. I loved how the author utilized classic dystopian tropes while relating to actual historical events. It makes your skin crawl thinking about the likelihood of this happening. I also enjoyed the multiple perspectives of those involved with the camps. They show how different people cope with such an inhumane situation.

Thank you to Netgalley and One World for a copy. This is out tomorrow April 8th!

This book is scary. Especially what is going on currently in the world. Could this realistically happen again. Yes, I could see this happening. I think this book is important for readers to realize that right now we are on a slippery slope. A couple of people’s actions should never be placed upon a community as a whole.
Thank you to Random House Publishing Group and Netgalley for letting me read this pivotal book.

After several domestic attacks by Vietnamese individuals, America puts its Vietnamese citizens in internment camps. My Documents is one family’s story as we follow different members.

This was a terrifying book to read right now with American’s current immigration policy and lack of DEI and civil rights protections. This book felt like it took place in today’s times and felt so real. I could 100% see things going down exactly as they did in this story. I loved the different perspectives and how we get different looks at the situation. Anyone interested in journalistic perspective will definitely find this one interesting. There is a perspective from the outside reporting on the camps and one from inside printing underground materials. This is a great read, although there were some parts towards the end that dragged a bit but then it would pick up again.

My Documents comes out 4/8.

When I started reading My Documents, I thought it was going to be a family - drama type novel about an extended family that emigrated from Vietnam. And while family and drama are a large part of the story, it is the forced internment into camps, reminiscent of World War II that is the focus of the novel. The incarceration was a result of an overreaction to attacks made in various airports around the country by a group of middle aged Viet men. It was chilling to see how quickly the rest of America accepted the detention of one million Vietnamese American citizens especially in today’s political climate.

The novel was heavy but always engaging as we get to know various members of one family, some who were in the camps and some who were not. Ursula, a journalist, gets her big break as she is fed information from her half sister, Jen who was ordered to the camp. Meanwhile, their father, Dan, is driving around the country to avoid being taken in. The various perspectives were interesting and thought provoking.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and One World for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.