Canada Reads longlist. Contemporary fiction about a Vietnamese-Canadian family running a nail salon in a rapidly-gentrifying neighbourhood in Toronto. Family tensions rise as a high-end salon opening across the street starts to push them out of business. We get a lot about micro-aggressions, labour discrimination, and inter-generational conflict. I learned a lot about the controversies in the salon industry circa 2016, which I'd only ever run into before via a story in Souvankham Thammavongsa's short story collection How to Pronounce Knife.

I sorta technically read the whole thing, but honestly ended up skimming quite a bit after the half way point. As one person who anti-recced it mentioned, the writing really needed about three more editing passes, but more than that it had a way higher quota of people making very stupid decisions than I can tolerate, and too many of them felt as though Nguyen included them purely to up the drama and pad the story out, rather than adding anything to the characterisation. The whole book felt a little shallow and unfinished, really.