Praise for The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys:

“Strom’s second collection explores the lives of four Vietnamese-American women through their interactions with men. The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen-seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle-class culture and indie sensibility... Quietly beautiful, Strom’s stories are hip without being ironic.”
- The New Yorker

“The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys cuts to the quick of what it means to be alive and burdened with a human heart. With exquisite brushstrokes and piercing accuracy, Dao Strom brings us face to face with the parts of our intimate selves we are so often running up against and at the same time, truly wish to forget.” - Holiday Reinhorn, author of Big Cats

“Quietly commanding in voice and perspective…This illuminating and subtly daring collection can be read on many levels.”    - Booklist

“...an acute, often painful, exploration of identity, displacement, and sexuality.”   - Venus Zine

“The title itself is worthy of erasing ‘battle of the sexes’ altogether from our vocabulary, as it proves so crude and destructive next to Strom’s naturalistic parsing of the tensions, desires, and subtle power shifts present between men and women, who are no more responsible for the order of things than boys and girls... A musician and [writer] who lives in Austin, Strom was born in Saigon and raised in California, and the themes in her work reflect that background, infused as they are with the experience of looking different, of seeing the scrubby Texas landscape through fresh eyes, of spending one’s time in nightclubs with tattooed boys and tired old musicians. Gentle Order is about these things and much more - the barbs and sudden intimacies of female friendship, the pitfalls of love and independence - and it’s all written with a feeling of subtle disvoery, as if even our most ugly and damning weaknesses, be they narcissistic, indecisive, jealous, or mean, are somehow borne out of innocence.”
- The Austin Chronicle

“Strom’s characters explore a new territory of cultural awareness, of the selves that we seem arbitrarily forced to inhabit. Although uncomfortably fresh in their observation, these stories address old truths. The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is an important and quietly powerful contribution to contemporary fiction.”
- Sabina Murray, author of The Caprices and screenwriter of The Beautiful Country

“Small moments carry enormous weight in these four loosely linked novellas about young Vietnamese women living in present-day California and Texas... For Strom, the most ordinary events--eating ice cream, swatting a fly--contain major 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.’” - Publishers Weekly

“Strom’s writing moves with catlike grace and attendant reflexes, conveying the inner workingsof a woman’s mind; a finer excavation of what cultural anthropologists like to call ‘feminine intuition’ cannot be found. The Polaroid flash reveals every fleshy detail, wanted or not, and inside these details lie the minirevelations.” - Metro Santa Cruz

“The best thing about The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is the chance to witness modern American life - balding jazz musicians, politically correct preschools, Texas luxury homes - through the eyes of Dao Strom’s dreamy female characters.”    - The Seattle Times

Praise for Grass Roof, Tin Roof:

“Strom’s writing is stunning: powerful yet modulated, impressionistic yet substantial. Her clear ability, combined with the important stories she has to tell, mark her as a force to be reckoned with.” - The Washington Post

“As a novel about immigrants, the story explores the perennial theme of alienation but often in fresh and challenging ways. Rather than describing Tran’s early years in America from her point of view, Strom lets Tran’s husband tell the story. When a neighbor comes by the house, Hus sees his wife as the neighbor might ‘squatting on the ground with her knees in her armpits’... It’s a far cry from the exoticized depiction of the alluring Asian woman. The relationships between these five people are plagued by anger, sadness, and a host of misunderstandings--cross-cultural, cross-gender, intergenerational, inadvertent, even wilful. Somehow, despite their troubles, they love one another. The surprise of the book lies not in the quality of the love--hard-won and often begrudging--but that it exists at all. This love becomes the family’s victory, and its delicate rendering the novel’s great triumph.” - Dana Sachs, author of the memoir The House On Dream Street

“…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 aching sense of rootlessness and identity crisis make for an affecting and memorable debut.” - Kirkus Reviews

“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, author of A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain

“[This] author reminds me of... Heinrich Boll (because of Strom’s ability to give voices to people’s inner minds) and Malcolm X (because of her vivid and accurate descriptions of contemporary U.S. society, as seen by ‘outsiders’ who also happen to be citizens... Dao Strom has written a virtually flawless book. Her characters will likely remain in your thoughts for some time to come.” - Ed Halloran, Rocky Mountain News