Tran's debut memoir...recounts in stunning detail his coming of age in white, small-town America.

... affecting, deeply felt.

Tran has written the great punk rock immigrant story. Or should that be the definitive refugee punk rock story? Or a story about how punk rock and great books helped a Vietnamese kid in small-town America fit in by standing out? Whatever order we put the words in, Tran’s book is my pick for the best, the funniest and the most heartfelt memoir of the year.

Tran's loosey-goosey writing style is all over the place in emotional tone and subject—something I might ordinarily find annoying, but kind of appreciate right now. In this confused and scary time, a story about displacement that itself is so scrambled feels just right to me.

There are flashes of tenderness and heartache, but over all [Tran's] parents are voids that obliterate all light and perception. The result is a coming-of-age that is solipsistic in its understanding of its own pain. Even now that Tran is a 40-something husband and father of two, a Latin teacher and tattoo-shop owner in Portland, Maine, his memories are not told with the wisdom of age, but with the arrested development of adolescence. His parents still seem impossibly foreign, trapped in the amber of how white people must see them. As a result, a mix of resentment and light condescension toward Vietnameseness hangs over the book.

... [a] funny heartbreaker.

... a lot smarter and a little edgier than Blinded by the Light in ways that matter to both the story and its messages.

Phuc Tran is someone who manages a number of seemingly disparate occupations.

Tran combines funny moments with heartbreaking stories; his explanations to his parents about why he wants to buy his clothes at Goodwill rather than the mall are laugh-out-loud funny, and readers will respond with compassion as he and his family deal with his mother’s cancer diagnosis.

Funny, poignant, and unsparing, Tran’s sharp, sensitive, punk-inflected memoir presents one immigrant’s quest for self-acceptance through the lens of American and European literary classics.

... high-impact, emotional.