Why a Booktrail?
2000s looking back: A young Vietnamese immigrant to the USA returns to her homeland
If I Had Two Lives
What you need to know before your trail
As a child, isolated from the world in a secretive military encampment with her distant mother, she turns for affection to a sympathetic soldier and to the only other girl in the camp, forming two friendships that will shape the rest of her life.
As a young adult in New York, cut off from her native country and haunted by the scars of her youth, she is still in search of a home. She falls in love with a married woman who is the image of her childhood friend, and follows strangers because they remind her of her soldier. When tragedy arises, she must return to Vietnam to confront the memories of her youth – and recover her identity.
An inspiring meditation on love, loss, and the presence of a past that never dies, the novel explores the ancient question: do we value the people in our lives because of who they are, or because of what we need them to be?
Travel Guide
Travel BookTrail style to Vietnam and New York
Where do we belong? Where we are born? Where we decide to move to? Where we live now? Does it matter where our family are? Where our roots are?
This is a story of the need to know where you belong (in terms of place and family) Vietnam and New York are two very different places of course, and where you live as a child affects how you live as an adult. How does a person move from a country to another where there is a great distance between them not just physically but in terms of lifestyle, wealth, culture and the everyday…
This is the story of one woman’s journey from childhood to adolescence, then adolescence to adulthood.
BookTrail Boarding Pass: If I Had Two Lives
Destination: Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam New York City Author/guide: Abbigail Rosewood Departure Time: 2000s
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