She Weeps Each Time You're Born

December 15, 2014
In Vietnam in 1975, a mother dies giving birth to a girl named Rabbit, for the rabbit visible in the full moon that night. In this lyrical and mysterious debut novel, jungle dirt and violence are juxtaposed with miracles and magic throughout Rabbit’s unlikely life. “Shortly after Rabbit’s birth, the Americans began withdrawing from the country... the war dragged on, the rice harvests left rotting in the paddies or never planted in the first place.” Barry, a prolific poet, writes with stunning language, which carries the novel and elevates moments of heartbreak, despair, and perseverance. However, the story line relies on supernatural marvels that can be difficult to buy into. For instance, after Rabbit’s mother dies, Rabbit is nursed by a young woman and fellow refugee named Qui, who is barely out of adolescence and likely a virgin, but whose body produces the milk with which to feed the baby. When Rabbit’s grandmother dies, several years later, Rabbit absorbs all of the grandmother’s memories and visions, through a kind of pipeline of knowledge. The metaphor is powerful but feels forced. While each individual vignette is mesmerizing, the leaps in logic and chronology feel jarring, and one wonders if the story would not have benefitted from a more straightforward approach.

Starred review from December 1, 2014
A magical child pulled from her mother's coffin observes and embodies Vietnam's tragic 20th-century history.Born in Saigon, Barry-an award-winning poet-offers a mesmerizing vista of Vietnam's recent past. Her small cast of characters, several of whom are gifted with surreal abilities, takes us from the rubber plantations of the French colonial era, through the American firebombing campaigns and the genocide in nearby Cambodia to the re-education camps. At the heart of the story is Rabbit, a girl who can hear and communicate with the war dead: "They call to me and they tell me things and I say, I hear you." Mysteriously plucked from her mother's grave, she's raised by a substitute family that includes, intermittently, her father, Tu, a Vietcong soldier, but also a spectrally beautiful woman named Qui whose eternally lactating breasts revive Rabbit when she's drained by contact with the spirit world. After the U.S. withdraws from the war, the group joins the flood of refugees heading south and later becomes boat people on a voyage filled with mysterious events and extreme dangers. Rescued from the ocean, sent to a re-education camp and then released, Rabbit eventually becomes renowned for her ability to uncover and ease the passing of the newly dead, including ethnically cleansed minorities and the victims of massacres that are denied by Hanoi. Rabbit's intuition will endanger her, but her contact with the appalling events of the past cannot be suppressed: "The simple act of someone hearing them, an acknowledgement, and then they can go wherever it is they go." While Barry's beautiful, transporting novel sometimes verges on the opaque, it pays resonant tribute to the uncounted dead below the surface of a convulsed nation.

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October 15, 2014
Barry's debut weaves a chronicle of life in pre- and postwar Vietnam within the mystical and turbulent journey of the novel's protagonist, Rabbit. Born shortly after American troops begin to withdraw from the country in the 1970s, Rabbit is left in the care of her ailing grandmother, but they have little choice but to abandon their war-torn village. Accompanied by an elderly honey seller, Huyen, and Huyen's granddaughter, Qui, they join the chaotic and desperate exodus of a population fleeing their homes for the unknown. Thus begins Rabbit's path from adolescence to early adulthood, where she navigates dislocation and harrowing incidents in an ever-shifting situation. Rabbit's tale is deepened by her unique ability to hear the voices of the dead. From these voices emerges a rich tapestry of stories, many tragic, spanning life in 1940s colonial Indochina, the reeducation camps following reunification of the North and South, and the market-oriented economic reforms of the 1980s. Barry's rich narrative entwines one personal tale with an evocative and haunting exploration of Vietnam's painful past.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2014

In this novel by Saigon-born Barry, the author of quietly fervent poetry honored with an AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize, Rabbit's ability to hear the voices of the dead allows her to chronicle Vietnam's history from the heyday of French Indochina to the dislocations of war and reunification.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2014

In 2001, on an evening with a full moon--when Asian folklore says a rabbit appears on the lunar surface--Amy Quan searches for a woman in Vietnam, "where I was born in the same year as her, our lives diametrically opposite." The woman, called Rabbit, was miraculously pulled from the grave of her dead mother on another full-moon night in 1972 and nourished long past infancy by a silent woman who will never nurse her own baby. Raised by two grandmothers and a sometime father and watched over by others, Rabbit encounters the "unnamed dead" in a country torn apart by centuries of domination and destruction. In the aftermath of war, "the government was trying to create one memory, one country, one official version of what happened." From single deaths to mass graves, Rabbit reveals the "stories the world is eager to bring to light...[the] stories it doesn't want told." VERDICT Blurring boundaries between history and invention, life and death, even verse and prose, English professor (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) and multi-award-winning poet Barry's first novel is fierce, stunning, and devastating. Readers haunted by Kim Thuy's Ru, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, and Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain will revel in it. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2014

In 2001, on an evening with a full moon--when Asian folklore says a rabbit appears on the lunar surface--Amy Quan searches for a woman in Vietnam, "where I was born in the same year as her, our lives diametrically opposite." The woman, called Rabbit, was miraculously pulled from the grave of her dead mother on another full-moon night in 1972 and nourished long past infancy by a silent woman who will never nurse her own baby. Raised by two grandmothers and a sometime father and watched over by others, Rabbit encounters the "unnamed dead" in a country torn apart by centuries of domination and destruction. In the aftermath of war, "the government was trying to create one memory, one country, one official version of what happened." From single deaths to mass graves, Rabbit reveals the "stories the world is eager to bring to light...[the] stories it doesn't want told." VERDICT Blurring boundaries between history and invention, life and death, even verse and prose, English professor (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) and multi-award-winning poet Barry's first novel is fierce, stunning, and devastating. Readers haunted by Kim Thuy's Ru, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, and Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain will revel in it. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.