Grass Roof, Tin Roof was published in 2003 by Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books.

“A brilliant exploration of exile, loss, and identity. It also innovatively explores the novel itself as an art form. Strom is an important new writer.”
- Robert Olen Butler

In this stunning novel about a Vietnamese family resettling in California gold country, Dao Strom investigates the myth of westward progress and the consequences of cultural displacement.

Told from multiple perspectives and interwoven with the intimate reflections of a middle child, Grass Roof, Tin Roof begins with the story of Tran, a Vietnamese writer facing government persecution, and follows her and her children’s passage to the West, where Strom’s characters viscerally experience the collision of cultures and the spiritual aftermath of war. Grass Roof, Tin Roof is a beautiful work of profundity and empathy, powerful emotion and rare insight.

More praise for Grass Roof, Tin Roof:

“ …the best complication is…the way the book keeps changing voice and viewpoint. There is little sentiment here. Instead, a cool, appraising eye is at work… Strom covers a lot of ground: wartime Saigon, post-hippiedom rural California, the ethnic neighborhoods of San Diego. Her lyrical-analytical prose is especially lithe in its reading of character, cultural displacement and the after-effects of war… It feels like the work of a major writer.”
- Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times

An excerpt from Grass Roof, Tin Roof :

That afternoon it rained on the swimming pool in town while we were having our lessons. The raindrops splashed on top of the clear pool water and made circles ripple and collide on the surface. Above us the sky was roiling and gray. It began to rain harder. Some kids shrieked and laughed and jumped up and down. The rain coming down made everybody turn their faces up together. The mothers in the deck chairs on the patio put their books or their kids’ towels over their heads, or they just laughed. Something was happening and I didn’t understand it, but I thought it was wonderful. Like the feeling of looking at a tree or the lake through the hair falling over my eyes and realizing no one else could have that view exactly ever; and how the poignant but amazing thing about that was this: I can’t show it to you. Or like the mysterious sense I got sometimes in the late summer sitting on our driveway, looking at a blade of grass and feeling: I am very close to the ground, the dirt dusty on my knees and legs and darkening the skin where it’d rubbed into my knuckles. I wished we could be frozen in time--the rain, the voices, the pool. The water came down on top of my head and face and already surrounded my whole body, and I thought: Maybe this is what it feels like to be buried.

I can’t show it to you.
I am very close to the ground.
Maybe this is what it feels like to be buried.


Grass Roof, Tin Roof by Dao Strom - available for purchase on amazon.com