The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys: Stories - Hardcover

Dao Strom is the author of a novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003) and a collection of stories, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2006). She is also a writer of songs. About her 2006 fiction collection, The New Yorker said, "Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic." She has received support from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener Fellowship and the Nelson Algren Award, among others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was born in Vietnam and grew up in northern California. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Small moments carry enormous weight in these four loosely linked novellas about young Vietnamese women living in present-day California and Texas. Mary, a film student, feels compelled to find meaning in a brief encounter she'd had with the young, white Kenny. Darcy, a cocktail waitress in San Francisco who encounters an intruder in her apartment, wonders why she cannot be "the kind of woman you needed to be... one who kept up proper barriers." Leena, married to a successful white American businessman with whom she has a young daughter, finds suburban Austin somehow "less of a life than she'd bargained for." Sage, a half-Vietnamese singer and songwriter sexually attracted to a teacher at her son's preschool, searches for the people and place that will finally feel like home. For Strom (Grass Roof, Tin Roof), the most ordinary events—eating ice cream, swatting a fly—contain minor epiphanies that can delicately convey her characters' sense of disconnection and longing. Though such moments sometimes strain under the burden of significance, Strom, like her character Mary, more often wisely leaves her audience "a little wanting—she will do no interpreting for them." (May)
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