SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “A WASP-Free America.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (26 May 1996): 2.

In the following review, Eder describes Mona in the Promised Land as a witty, thoughtful, and beautifully narrated story.

Gish Jen's Typical American was a brilliantly witty and affecting novel of a Chinese family eroding like an island in the sucking tides of American culture.

Mona in the Promised Land is a sequel in a way. It focuses on what the tides restore: a 16-year-old whose stubborn sensibility obliges her to invent a way to be American that takes account of her cultural traditions even while rebelling against them.

The novel, as witty as Typical American and more thoughtful—though much more discursive and in some ways less affecting—relates Mona's quirky, gallant and oddly persuasive effort at appropriation. Not only is her America also Chinese American, it is America insofar as it is also Chinese...