'Short Girls' by Bich Minh Nguyen

"This is a country of tall people," Dinh Luong frequently reminds his daughters, Van and Linny, the protagonists of Bich Minh Nguyen's first novel, "Short Girls," which follows her acclaimed memoir, "Stealing Buddha's Dinner." For the Luong family, height is a metaphor for the limitations of their Vietnamese heritage, recorded for posterity on the wall of their suburban Michigan home: Dinh, 5 feet 3; Van, 5- 1/8 ; Mrs. Luong, 4-11 1/2 ; Linny, 4-11.

Dinh's indignation crystallizes when a friend plays a song he calls "Short People Are No Reason to Live." His daughter tries to explain that it's "got," not "are," but the distinction doesn't matter much. Dinh's inventions -- the Luong Arm, the Luong Eye and the Luong Wall, each designed to overcome the obstacles of shortness -- are never successfully patented or sold.

Van, the serious-minded older sister, has always been an overachiever, her journey through law school spurred by the need to help her father with his patents and to assist their friends and community with immigration and green card issues. As a girl, she maintained for her dad a list of Famous Short People, including Queen Elizabeth I, Danny DeVito, Pablo Picasso, Honore de Balzac and Tom Cruise.

By the time "Short Girls" begins, however, Van's sense of possibility has been profoundly curtailed. In the wake of Sept. 11, she is unable to keep a client from being deported for carrying a concealed firearm, a verdict she takes so personally that she changes jobs to a dull position shuffling visa paperwork.

This defeat is followed closely by a miscarriage and kicks off a downward spiral that culminates in her tall, fourth-generation California Chinese husband walking out on her without a word.

Younger sister Linny is the opposite of Van -- in fact, she seems like a character from a chick lit novel, with a life of brand-name clothing, boyfriends, happy hours and a job at You Did It Dinners, where she helps suburban moms put together ready-to-eat meals for the freezer.

Though her family never stops giving her a hard time for dropping out of college -- and most people seem to think her destiny is to work in a nail salon like the one in which her mother dropped dead of a stroke at 42 -- she has far more self-confidence than her older, brighter and even slightly taller sister.

A typical moment occurs when Linny runs into an old classmate at her father's citizenship party: