She Treads Softly: The Family Recipe

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

The Family Recipe

The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh
4/1/25; 320 pages
Atria Books

The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh is a highly recommended family drama following a highly dysfunctional Vietnamese family in Texas.

Duc Tran, founder of the Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc’s Sandwiches, has decided to retire. His wife Evelyn left the family twenty years ago. His new wife Connie is off vacationing and Duc has traveled somewhere to hide. Duc has his best friend and lawyer, Huey Ngo, meet with five estranged adult children about their inheritance. What they are given is a challenge. His four daughters, Jane, Paulina, Bingo, and Georgina, 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.

What follows are chapter from many different points-of-view, including Duc and Heuy's history, all the individual adult children, Evelyn, and Connie. Duc and Heuy's experiences cover their past history as Vietnamese immigrants who arrived after the war in Vietnam. The individual personalities and struggles of each character come to life in their chapters. Each different perspective is interesting in its own way, however some are more compelling than others.

Each daughter tackles the challenge of fixing up the sandwich shops they have been assigned in their own way. Georgia, the youngest daughter, finds more than a sandwich shop. She finds their missing mother living in New Orleans.

While the novel is enjoyable, because who doesn't occasionally appreciate a messy family drama, none of the characters are especially appealing or likable. It would be nice to have some character to support. This is also a very culturally specific novel as it follows the family history. It does explore finding your way through in life, inter-generational trauma, legacy, fatherly love, and how you fit in across the generations.

The Family Recipe is a good choice for readers who enjoy stories from everyone's point-of-view in a dysfunctional family from a specific cultural background. Thanks to Atria Books for providing me with an advance reader's copy via Edelweiss. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.