One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2021 * One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 * New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize “Dizzyingly original, fiercely funny, deeply wise.” —Celeste Ng, #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere “Sanjena Sathian’s Gold Diggers is a work of 24-karat genius.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post How far would you go for a piece of the American dream? A magical realist coming-of-age story, Gold Diggers skewers the model minority myth to tell a hilarious and moving story about immigrant identity, community, and the underside of ambition. A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is funny and smart but struggles to bear the weight of expectations of his family and their Asian American enclave. He tries to want their version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal. When he discovers that Anita is the beneficiary of an ancient, alchemical potion made from stolen gold—a “lemonade” that harnesses the ambition of the gold’s original owner—Neil sees his chance to get ahead. But events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart. Years later in the Bay Area, Neil still bristles against his community's expectations—and finds he might need one more hit of that lemonade, no matter the cost. Sanjena Sathian’s astonishing debut offers a fine-grained, profoundly intelligent, and bitingly funny investigation into what's required to make it in America. Soon to be a series produced by Mindy Kaling!

Starting with the positive, all of us thought the idea of stealing someone's gold as a magically real metaphor for taking their ambition was a great mythology to base the story on. Sathian does just a terrific job weaving the themes of immigration and ambition through the concept of gold digging throughout the book, from the history of gold speculation moving from Georgia to California to the tragic history of the Bombayan gold digger. That said, a lot of the power of the novel is rooted in whether you feel something for Neil and Anita as they hustle and struggle under the pressure to achieve in high school. Some of us at NUBClub knew people (or were people) in that situation and we thus could read a lot into and empathize greatly with their struggles. Others felt that the novel didn't go far enough to establish what the stresses on the kids were or why we should care. The plot was a bit rough for everyone. While the early part of the novel does a good job establishing Neil getting drawn into the gold drinking cabal and using his classmates for his fix, the second half of the novel ends with a comedic heist scene at a wedding convention that just defies belief, and the plot takes a turn at the end to a confusing magically real moment and then a suddenly happy resolved ending. We understood that the point of Sathian's book is that less ambitious lives are still happy and valuable ones, but the way the books ties up just felt too pat. There was a lot to like in Gold Diggers, from the core conceit to the depiction of the striving of immigrant families to the deep questions of what Indian-American identity means. But if you don't find the stresses of high-achieving teenagers moving, this book will not work for you.