The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys - by Dao Strom (Paperback)

About the Book

"When The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys was first published in 2006, it was groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary young Vietnamese women living in the United States, centering their ordinary lives as mothers, lovers, friends, and daughters against the backdrop of immigration and assimilation. Available now for the first time in paperback and featuring an introduction by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and a new preface by the author, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a beautifully written, psychologically astute foray into the rite of female passage."--

Book Synopsis

"The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen-seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle-class culture and indie sensibility . . . Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic." --The New Yorker

When The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys was first published in 2006, it was groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary young Vietnamese women living in the United States, centering their ordinary lives as mothers, lovers, friends, and daughters against the backdrop of immigration and assimilation. Available now for the first time in paperback and featuring an introduction by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and a new preface by the author, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a beautifully written, psychologically astute foray into the rite of female passage.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys

"The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen-seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle-class culture and indie sensibility... Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic." --The New Yorker

"Unique--though I read avidly, I had not yet encountered a book whose sentences conversed with me, rather than speaking above me. I admired the fact that these stories did not offer definitive, epiphanic resolutions, focusing on the interiority and intimate experiences of the characters as they process the world around them." --Meghan Lamb, Los Angeles Review of Books

"With precise, lyrical language, Dao Strom takes on motherland, music, and lust. After spending an afternoon with the four women in The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, I see the world around me differently: every quiet passerby full of yearning, each gesture important and strange." --Amanda Eyre Ward, author of How To Be Lost

"There is an underlying emotional current running through these stories that pulls you into a world populated by strong, wise, and displaced women. Dao Strom has a rare talent--the ability to capture feelings and thoughts you don't think can be described, and convey them in elegant prose." --Vendela Vida, author of And Now You Can Go

"Dao Strom's characters explore a new territory of cultural awareness, of the selves that we seem arbitrarily forced to inhabit. Although uncomfortably fresh in their observation, these stories address old truths. The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is an important and quietly powerful contribution to contemporary fiction." --Sabina Murray, author of The Caprices

"The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys cuts to the quick of what it means to be alive and burdened with a human heart. With exquisite brushstrokes and piercing accuracy, Dao Strom brings us face to face with the parts of our intimate selves we are so often running up against and at the same time, truly wish to forget." --Holiday Reinhorn, author of Big Cats

"Small moments carry enormous weight in these four loosely linked novellas about young Vietnamese women living in present-day California and Texas." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Dao Strom is the author of You Will Always Be Someone from Somewhere Else; We Were Meant to Be a Gentle People; Grass Roof, Tin Roof; and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys. She has received awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, RACC, the NEA, and others. She was born in Vietnam, grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, and is now based in Portland, Oregon. Find out more at daostrom.com.