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The Family Recipe

A Novel

ebook
2 of 4 copies available
2 of 4 copies available
"Delightful....A funny yet poignant tale of one family's search for belonging and understanding." —Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author

From the author of the "sharp, smart, and gloriously extra" (Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times bestselling author) Good Morning America Book Club Pick The Fortunes of Jaded Women, a stunning family dramedy about estranged siblings competing to inherit their father's Vietnamese sandwich franchise and unravel family mysteries.
Duc Tran, the eccentric founder of the Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc's Sandwiches, has decided to retire. No one has heard from his wife, Evelyn, in two decades. She abandoned the family without a trace, and clearly doesn't want anything to do with Duc, the business, or their kids. But the money has to go to someone. With the help of the shady family lawyer, Duc informs his five estranged adult children that to receive their inheritance, his four daughters must revitalize run-down shops in old-school Little Saigon locations across America: Houston, San Jose, New Orleans, and Philadelphia—within a year. But if the first-born (and only) son, Jude, gets married first, everything will go to him.

Each daughter is stuck in a new city, battling gentrification, declining ethnic enclaves, and messy love lives, while struggling to modernize their father's American dream. Jude wonders if he wants to marry for love or for money—or neither. As Duc's children scramble to win their inheritance, they begin to learn the real intention behind the inheritance scheme—and the secret their mother kept tucked away in the old fishing tackle box, all along.

The Family Recipe is about rediscovering one's roots, different types of fatherly love, legacy, and finding a place in a divided country where the only commonality among your neighbors is the universal love of sandwiches.
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    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

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    A simple complexity publication with cover images and logos, converted to meet EPUB Accessibility specifications of WCAG-AA level. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for cover images and logos, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order, structural navigation, and semantic structure. Blank pages from print have been removed in this ebook, with related page number spans set on the first following in-spine page. Certain front and back matter pages have been adjusted in the reading order sequence from print, with related page references removed in the page-list order.

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    • The publication contains a conformance statement that it meets the EPUB Accessibility and WCAG 2 Level AA standard.

    • This publication claims to meet EPUB Accessibility 1.0 WCAG 2.0 Level AA.

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    • Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.

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    • Page breaks included

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  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      November 1, 2024

      Huynh's debut, The Fortunes of Jaded Women, was a GMA book club pick and is being adapted for television. Her new novel features Duc Tran, founder of a Vietnamese sandwich chain. He's ready to retire and decides to make his estranged children compete for their inheritance. As they work to revitalize run-down sandwich shops, the siblings also uncover family secrets. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      March 1, 2025
      The Trần siblings, five sisters and one brother, are pulled back into each other's lives after years of estrangement by their father Duc's will, put together by their family friend and lawyer. Once part of a family that built a successful chain of shops called Duc's Sandwiches, their lives were upended with the disappearance of their mother, Duc's first wife, Evelyn. The siblings are given a year to complete tasks tied to their inheritance. The daughters must revitalize the failing sandwich shops across the U.S., while Jude, the eldest sibling and only son, must marry. The first to succeed inherits everything. A chaotic journey of personal discovery, love, and healing unfolds as the siblings learn more about their family's experiences grappling with racism, generational trauma, and survival as Vietnamese refugees. Laced with humor and heartbreak, Huynh's (The Fortunes of Jaded Women, 2022) storytelling shines through the cacophony of Trần family dynamics. As she tells of family, food, and fractured relationships through her characters, universal themes of belonging and resilience will resonate with readers of all backgrounds.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Kirkus

      May 1, 2025
      Five estranged siblings must uproot their lives in order to win their father's inheritance. Jude, Jane, Bingo, Paulina, and Georgia Tr�n have never been close. Their mother, Evelyn, disappeared when they were young, leaving them in Houston to be raised by their father, Duc, the head of a banh mi shop empire. The four daughters spent their youth just waiting to turn 18 and leave home; Jude, the lone son, was the only one to stay behind, siding with their father. Now the siblings, in their 20s and early 30s, have been called back to the family home by Huey Ng�, their father's lawyer and best friend, who informs the five siblings that in the next year they must each accomplish a task that's been set by their father: All four sisters are being sent to a failing shop--one each in Houston, Philadelphia, San Jose, and New Orleans--and told to make it successful again. Jude, meanwhile, has to get married. Whoever finishes first wins the entire inheritance. As the siblings start on their projects, they re-examine their lives, their relationships, and what their family actually means to them. Huynh jumps among the characters' perspectives as well as jumping in time, slowly revealing the story of the Tr�n parents' origins from the time they fled Vietnam to the morning Evelyn left; the story also moves forward as each sibling learns from their ordeal. While this book is clearly filled with love for its characters and Vietnamese American culture, it's an epic family drama squashed into the length of an average novel. The ideas and the writing are good, but they needed more room to breathe. A family story big on plot but short on characterization.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 19, 2025
      In Huynh’s zesty sophomore effort (after The Fortunes of Jaded Women), the five Trân siblings compete for their inheritance. Duc, founder of the national Duc’s Sandwiches chain, assigns each of his four daughters one of the company’s floundering outlets, on the provision that if they manage to turn their store around within one year, they’ll get a cut of his estate. However, he also says that if their older brother, Jude, gets married before that time, he’ll get everything. In Houston, Jude starts falling for his fiancée, Phoebe, after making a deal with her to marry for Duc’s money. Meanwhile, the youngest sister, Georgia, encounters their estranged mother Evelyn—who walked out on the family 20 years earlier—in New Orleans, where she runs a Duc’s restaurant. The reasons behind her departure gradually come to light after Bingo, one of the middle sisters, who’s stationed in Philadelphia, uncovers a previously unknown link between Evelyn and family friend Huey Ngô, who helped Duc upon the latter’s arrival in Texas when the KKK was terrorizing immigrants. Adding to the present-day drama, Jude finds out Phoebe is seeing someone else. Some of the final revelations are a bit far-fetched, but Huynh keeps up the momentum with lively dialogue. Readers are in for a treat. Agent: Jordan Hill, New Leaf Literary.

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