Awards

• Short-listed for Slate's Cartoonist Studio Prize 2017 (United States)
• Winner of Pop Culture Classroom Excellence in Graphic Literature Awards Finalist 2018 (United States)

Overview

National bestseller ABA Indies Introduce Winter / Spring 2017 Selection Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Spring 2017 Selection An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family's journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui. This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent - the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home. In what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls ""a book to break your heart and heal it,"" The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui's journey of understanding, and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.

Full Product Details

9781419718779

Table of Contents

Reviews

This bold, brutal book is the new calligraphy an exquisite marriage of alphabet and imagery. Each sentence, each scene, and each story breaks down a country, a family, and a father. Then, frame by frame, with artistic vigor and monastic devotion, Thi Bui rebuilds a world in which guilt conquers grief and gratitude becomes not only a guide, but our new Deity. <i>The Best We Could Do</i> teaches us how to say no to fear and yes to truth. --Fae Myenne Ng author of Bone, a PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist, Steer Toward Rock, winner of the American Book Award

""" Thi Bui's debut interweaves an account of her own life in the US with her parents' coming-of-age in, and eventual escape from, Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s. [...] Yet this is not a book without hope. The Best We Can Do shows that empathy trumps hate, fear and cruelty."" Times Higher Education Supplement ""...explore life for those displaced by the Vietnam war with great subtlety."" The Observer"

Thi Bui s book took my breath away. In a time of continuing refugee crisis, its message is necessary. <i>The Best We Could Do </i>expands one family s personal story into a global, historic context, while condensing generations of war in Vietnam to intimate and human proportions. Beautiful and powerful. --Craig Thompson, author and illustrator of Blankets and Habibi

Author Information

Thi Bui was born in Việt Nam three months before the end of the American War and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees from Southeast Asia. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017), has been selected as UCLA’s Common Book for 2017, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, an Eisner Award finalist in Reality-Based Work, and made several “best of 2017” book lists, including Bill Gates’s top five picks. Bui is also the Caldecott Honor–winning illustrator of A Different Pond, a picture book by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017). Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, Reveal News, PEN America, and BOOM California. Bui taught high school in New York City and was a founding teacher of Oakland International High School, the first public high school in California for recent immigrants and English learners. Since 2015, she has been a faculty member of the MFA in Comics program at the California College of the Arts. Bui lives in the Bay Area.

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