This is the story of three generations of Vietnamese-American mothers. The first, Minh, was a canny businesswoman who escaped from Vietnam shortly after the fall of Saigon, with her devoted husband, daughter, and son, and a significant amount of gold sewn into her children’s clothing. (She had owned a very lucrative jewelry business – good choice.) Upon making their way to Florida, they purchased Banyan House, a Gothic manor house complete with the aforementioned massive tree out front.
It was here her daughter, Huong, grew up. (Son too, but he soon faffed off.) She married a man of the Vietnamese diaspora, but he left her early on, leaving her to raise their daughter, Ann, on her own. Several other partners did not take for Huong, but eventually Ann ends up, post-college, with a rich WASP boyfriend on the shores of a swank lake house in upper New York. She and her mother have been estranged for a while, but then something changes. Ann’s beloved grandmother, Minh, dies and the other two are brought back to the decaying Banyan House and all its many secrets. Minh, mind you, even though dead, has an equal narrator voice in all of this. But she wasn’t exactly the beloved grandma Ann remembers, and family secrets begin to reveal themselves, as pieces of the puzzle start to fit together.
Much as I enjoyed all the family drama, I was left wondering about the titular house. Are there really Gothic mansions on the Florida coast? With sinister attics and all? Decaying, I can imagine. Hey, I had an uncle who lived in central Florida, and moss growing on the interior walls was a real thing. But then he was one weird dude.