Short Girls

Sisters Van and Linny - like their father - are short. But they couldn't be more different. Van's the overachiever - a high-flying lawyer with a pristine home and husband, until the husband walks out. Linny is fashionable, flighty, works for a catering firm called You Did It Dinners and has just been told by her married lover that he's sticking with his wife. So much to talk about. And yet they don't. However, when their father invents a device to enable short people to reach high objects but needs to become an American citizen to sell it, the sisters are forced to work together to help him. If he's ever to succeed in an American Idol-style reality TV show for desperate inventors, Van and Linny must put aside their differences and admit what it is they have in common . . .

Bich Minh Nguyen is the author of the memoir Stealing Buddha's Dinner. She teaches at Purdue University and lives in Chicago and West Lafayette.