The Gangster We Are All Looking for

This acclaimed novel reveals the life of a Vietnamese family in America through the knowing eyes of a child finding her place and voice in a new country.

In 1978 six refugees--a girl, her father, and four "uncles"--are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child's imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father's hopeless rage.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 05/11/2004
ISBN: 9780375700026
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.37lbs
Size: 8.21h x 4.96w x 0.47d

Review Citations: Kliatt 09/01/2004 pg. 23
School Library Journal 03/01/2005 pg. 70

Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 70634 / Gangster We Are All Looking for
Reading Level: 5.7 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 6