Pioneer GirlPioneer Girl

"Lee Lien has long dodged her Vietnamese family’s rigid expectations by immersing herself in books--her favorite is Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. But now, jobless, with a PhD in literature, she is back at home, working in her mother's restaurant under hypercritical gaze. When Lee's brother suddenly vanishes, he leaves behind an object from the family's past that stirs up a forgotten childhood dream: a gold-leaf brooch, abandoned by an American reporter in Saigon back in 1965, that may have belonged to Wilder herself. As Lee explores this tenuous connection, she follows a trail of clues leading from dusty library stacks to the farthest reaches of the American West, where what she finds will transform strangers' lives as well as her own"--Back cover