From O. Henry Award winner and two-time Giller Prize winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labor, and class, an intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don’t even know her true name.
“I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name ‘Susan.'”
Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer’s day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.
As the day’s work grinds on, the friction between Ning’s two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.
Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Color confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa’s place as literature’s premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.
My Review
This was… kind of a hard one to rate, honestly. I landed at 3 stars, but it’s one of those books where I feel like that number doesn’t fully explain my experience.
Pick a Color is very much a slice-of-life novel—it all takes place over the course of a single day, and there’s not really a traditional plot driving things forward. Instead, the book is built around Ning’s observations of the clients who come into the salon and the quiet rhythms of her work. It’s deeply introspective, and the writing reflects that. You can absolutely tell that Souvankham Thammavongsa is a poet—the prose is simple, precise, and often really thoughtful in a way that sneaks up on you.
At the same time, I wouldn’t call this particularly plot-driven or even strongly character-driven. We learn bits and pieces about Ning—her past as a boxer, small anecdotes about her coach, her relationship to her work—but she still feels a little distant, like we’re only ever seeing one layer of her. She doesn’t have much of a life outside the salon, and that sense of isolation is definitely intentional, but it also made it harder for me to fully connect.
What I found most interesting was actually the dynamic within the salon itself—especially the absence of one employee who stopped showing up after asking for her pay in advance. That thread lingered in the background and added this quiet tension, and I kept expecting it to go somewhere… but it never really does. I’ll be honest, that was a little frustrating because it felt like the closest thing the book had to a central mystery, and I wanted more from it.
Overall, I didn’t find this book particularly interesting, but I also didn’t find it boring either—which is such a strange reading experience to describe. It just kind of… exists in this in-between space. That said, it did absolutely cement one thing for me: when you’re at the nail salon, the nail techs are 100% talking about you in their own language.
THE GOOD:
- The prose is simple, poetic, and quietly thoughtful
- The slice-of-life structure makes it a quick, easy read
- The observational tone captures small, everyday moments really well
- There’s an interesting undercurrent of labor, class, and identity throughout
THE NOT-AS-GOOD:
- There’s no real plot, which made it hard to stay fully engaged
- The main character feels somewhat distant and underdeveloped
- The most intriguing thread (the missing coworker) doesn’t go anywhere
- It’s not particularly emotionally gripping
THE NEUTRAL:
- This is very much a quiet, introspective read—if you love plot-driven stories, this may not work for you
- The pacing is slow and steady, with more focus on observation than action
OVERALL RATING: ⭐⭐⭐
Pick a Color is a quiet, introspective slice-of-life novel with poetic prose—interesting in concept, but a bit too distant and uneventful to fully land.
PERFECT FOR:
- Readers who enjoy literary, slice-of-life fiction
- Fans of introspective, character-observation-driven stories
- Readers who appreciate poetic, minimalist prose
- Anyone interested in themes of labor, identity, and the immigrant experience
