Reading is better together

"I wanted my first BookHive entry to be something that felt less like a performance of taste and more like a beginning. The Best We Could Do is exactly that kind of book: quiet, intimate, and devastating without ever becoming loud. Thi Bui writes about family, migration, memory, motherhood, and inherited silence with a tenderness that never feels decorative. What stayed with me most is how honestly the book understands that family history is rarely given to us neatly. It arrives in fragments, in things left unsaid, in sacrifices we only understand years later. This is not only a story about leaving one country and building a life in another. It is also about trying to see your parents as full people, not just as the roles they had to survive inside. A beautiful, restrained, deeply human book. I cannot imagine a better place to begin."

"I loved 80% of this book! I think the character work is great, a bunch of it is something that you could almost construe as a school drama but in such a neat way that it doesn't feel rote, really excellent writing as always from Leckie! My only complaint is that the last section of the book switches to a more action centred climax when what I really wanted was more internality from the leads about the transformation we've spent the book talking about, which instead happens offscreen and we do not see their perspectives on the process or its results and anything about how they've changed. Give me a sequel where we see more of Qven and Reet in their new life if that's what it takes to give me more about how they're new, but I would have liked that to be the last quarter of the book instead of the climax we got"