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Children’s, Teenage & Educational

THE COCONUT CHILDREN

Vivian Pham

Sonny and Vince have always known each other. It took two years of juvenile prison, a crazy mother and a porn stash for them to meet again.

The year is 1998. The place is Cabramatta, a Sydney suburb with the largest Vietnamese population in Australia. Stabbings are commonplace, drug dealers peddle on every street corner and teenage boys are armed with pocketknives. Sixteen-year-old Sonny Vuong couldn't be more removed from all the trouble that stirs right outside her bedroom window. Sheltered and helplessly hormonal, Sonny is consumed with a burning desire for just about anyone. Her casual love interests include a balding high school chemistry teacher, any KFC employee that happens to spare her a glance and, of course, Prince William. The web of steamy affairs she has invented for her own entertainment has helped her cope with her controlling and angry mother. But all pretenses threaten to fall apart at the return of Vince Tran, a family friend who was taken to juvenile prison two years ago. Now, Vince is back, and Sonny is determined to light a flame in his heart. Only one problem remains: they have not spoken a word to each other since they were children. Against all odds, an unlikely and sweet romance blossoms. In an age where children are forced out of their youth, Sonny and Vince pick up the scraps of innocence together. The Coconut Children is a tale of coming of age, growing apart from parents, and coming to terms with who we are, instead of how others see us. VIVIAN PHAM is an eighteen-year-old student and writer. Her father was the same age when he escaped war-torn Vietnam by boat and set out to make a life for himself in America. Vivian was born in Orange County California and emigrated to Australia with her family as a toddler. The Coconut Children was purchased by Penguin Random House in a five-way auction. Vivian recently attended the invitation-only International Congress of Youth Voices in San Francisco founded by Dave Eggers.

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Book Published 2021-09-14 by Penguin Vintage

Comments

The Coconut Children is an all time, new favourite read for me. I was reminded of Looking For Alibrandi, but with more metaphors. Pham is a fabulous Vietnamese-Australian author who writes in an authentic voice that, quite honestly, you probably haven't heard before. That alone is reason enough to give it a go, but it's also well written, with a story that keeps you captivated the whole way through.

The Coconut Children is rich and incredible, and unmistakeably wholly formed. Reading new author Vivian Pham's work is like discovering a pack of perfectly ripened strawberries and a bottle of beer at the back of the fridge. It's unlikely, it doesn't happen often, and when it does, you just have to embrace the whole experience. Reading Pham is like reading a young Salman Rushdie or a Zadie Smith. Her inventiveness with language and her keen read on the strata of society make The Coconut Children essential reading

This is an outstanding debut about love, memory, community and finding your place in a beautiful and heartbreaking world. Pham is a master at showing that all people are complex, contradictory and difficult to define. The characters in The Coconut Children will linger on in your mind like a great open-ended question.

A sharply observed, urgent and wise coming-of-age novel. This is a book about love, memory, community and two teenagers finding their plane in their world, whilst fighting against the chains of intergenerational trauma.

A deeply affecting coming-of-age story. Pham adroitly evokes the emblems of suburban living, specifically Cabramatta. There is a meticulous level of detail in every sentence, elevating the ordinary into the sublime and imbuing the narrative with a magical quality. The Coconut Children is a book about what it is like to navigate a world that's not made for you, but it retains levity and a crucial sense of hope throughout.

While Pham's tale starts slowly and simply, it builds into a moving and emotionally gripping story that has the reader desperate for a happily ever after ending for Sonny and Vince.

It's rare that a debut novel is so brazenly confident it swaggers but Vivian Pham's The Coconut Children is one such book. Set in Cabramatta in the late 1990s, it's an impressive synthesis of place and character, and the dialogue and set pieces between teenage sweethearts Sonny Vuong and Vincent Tran crackle with energy. In this pocket of western Sydney beset with poverty and its concomitant bedfellows, crime and violence, Pham draws deep from her own experiences, but the book is also adorned with poetic flourishes and irradiated with humour and warmth. Full of colour and detail and written with the bravura of adolescence that young Pham herself has barely left behind, The Coconut Children marks a new literary talent.

You can smell and taste this book a vivid picture of Cabramatta in all its late millennium glory and grit. Vivian Pham goes straight to the important things in life food, family, friendship, freedom, sex, love and death. The writing is full of grace and courage fierce, frank and funny. And the tale keeps twisting 'til the end.

In lyric slivers as sharp as the 'blade of water' refugees cross in the novel's preface, Pham maps the shape and grain of fierce and fragile resilience against intergenerational trauma, secrets and desire. The momentum of this novel, its originality, energy and verve, are extraordinary. Vivian Pham is, without doubt, a major new talent.

To read Vivian Pham is to read the future of Australian writing. What a brilliant, self-contained bolt of pure teenage genius. Be prepared to be awed over what Gen Z can deliver.

For all its darkness and violence, the novel is graced with humour, vivid characterisation and an unerring sense of place and time. Pham juxtaposes surprisingly delicate moments amid the grit: bright respite, like the straggling flowers on the rail embankments that catch Sonny's eye, or the tender Vietnamese ballads of loss sung at karaoke by Vincent's rag-tag posse. The Coconut Children is about having second and third chances, about a defiance of hereditary malaise and a reminder, too, that ''sometimes, having hope is as simple as letting yourself forget who you've been before''.

The novel sensitively depicts the impacts of drug use, domestic violence and sexual trauma - the aftershocks of surviving the American/Vietnam War. Pham conveys just enough detail to bear witness; the brutality surrounding and within these families is not spectacle but a cold fact of life. Lush and lyrical, irreverent yet poignant, Pham's prose crackles with energy. The Coconut Children is an effervescent debut filled with vivid characters, where a single gesture, a single look, encapsulates a world.

Film Rights · Caravan Pictures with Director Ben Lawrence Theatre· Belvoir Theatre, Sydney

Along comes Vivian Pham, the 19-year-old daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, with a debut novel so searingly beautiful that any cynicism about the telling of trauma is forced to take a back seat. Her unlikely teenage love story, set on the hard-scrabble streets of 1990s Cabramatta, is so tightly embroidered with lyrical observations, I stopped marking passages that snagged my breath. Open the novel randomly and they fall into your lap. But a gift with words is only one tool in Pham's skill set. What gives this novel real power is her adept construction of her narrative; the exquisite descriptions captivate just long enough for the plot to sidle up and deliver a brutal gut punch.

The Coconut Children is an incredible achievement. Pham writes with a poetic intensity and maturity that belies her young age. Pham delivers a frank insight into the complicated lives of these endearing characters and weaves plenty of humour throughout. An amazing debut!

A brilliant debut from a new Australian literary talent. A hopeful and moving coming of age story.

You'd have to go back to Carson McCullers's debut to find such an accomplished and original voice in a writer so young. I've seen Vivian Pham stun an audience of 2000 with her oratory and original thinking on colonialism and the burden of history, and now she stuns on the page in this deeply felt and intimate coming-of-age novel. She shows a new Australia here, tied to her place and time but touching on universal themes of longing and the alternately profound and ludicrous angst of youth. Vivian Pham is one of the indispensable voices of her generation.

Shortlisted ABIA New Writer of the Year 2021 (winner tba April 28) Shortlisted The Victoria Premier's Award 2021 Shortlisted The New South Wales Premier's Literary Award 2021

Pham's non-judgmental portraits of parents living with trauma and children struggling to comprehend their parents' choices is nuanced and wise; work one would expect from a writer far beyond Pham's very young years. Each of us eagerly await the future development of this remarkable new voice and firework of a talent.

The Coconut Children has generated great interest in the publishing world. It is brilliant, evocative and powerful, written with a distinctly new voice.