Jenna Bush Hager’s August 2025 Read With Jenna book club pick is a coming-of-age tale — and a mystery.
“My Other Heart” by Emma Nanami Strenner starts in the Philadelphia airport, where Mimi, a young mother, is waiting to return home to Vietnam with her 1-year-old daughter.
After looking away for a few moments, Mimi looks back to see her daughter has vanished, and starts to panic. Unable to come up with the words to explain what happened in English, she winds up back in Vietnam, where she spends her life searching for her long lost daughter.
Seventeen years later, two best friends Kit and Sabrina are spending their last summer before college together searching for who they are and their family histories — all while Mimi gets a lead in her search that brings her back to Philadelphia.
“I love this book so much. It’s the story of mothers, daughters, friendship. It’s full of heart and full of twists. I could not put it down,” Jenna says.
“It’s a deeply moving book about motherhood, identity and the invisible threads that connect us,” she continues.
Nanami Strenner tells TODAY.com her debut novel is about what happens when Kit, Sabrina and Mimi’s worlds “come together and collide.”
“Kit and Sabrina want to head out into their summer and go and discover their roots and get to know themselves better,” Nanami Strenner says. “They have lots of ideas about who that might be, but they’re also searching for a way to belong.”
“And then 17 years earlier, a mother is in the Philadelphia airport and she tragically loses her child,” she continues. “It’s how all these women’s lives come together and collide, but it is a story that explores connection and the feeling of being seen — and not seen — when you are a teenager and when you’re an adult, and it is about that yearning to belong.”
Nanami Strenner says the opening pages of the book were inspired by times she’s been in foreign airports with her own daughter, and her fears of the worst case scenario.
“I’ve been in that situation so many times with my own daughter … and I just remember being in really far flung countries where sometimes the people there didn’t speak English, and I couldn’t speak their language,” Nanami Strenner says. “It would be the most terrifying thing that she would get away from me and I wouldn’t be able to do anything.”
“I allowed myself to consider the worst case scenario in that which is what led me to the beginning of the novel,” she adds. “What if I was powerless and I didn’t have language, and I had no means and … I was in this situation where I was completely rendered helpless and unable to find the most precious thing in my life?”
Nanami Strenner says she began to get the idea for the full novel when she looked on how much time she’s spent in airports in her own life, growing up in England before living in Japan, Vietnam and more, before landing in Philadelphia before the pandemic.
“I think all the threads started to come together — you’re in this sort of strange purgatory when you’re in an airport, because you’re leaving a place behind while trying of move in to the next place,” Nanami Strenner says. “I think that’s where the two girls, Kit and Sabrina, are in this sort of in betweenness themselves.”
“While they’re about to head out into adulthood, they don’t understand exactly who they are … and they’re trying to grapple with themselves,” she continues. All those pieces sort of came together when I was thinking about it.”
Nanami Strenner started writing the book in 2020, and would wake up every day at 5 a.m. to have two full hours of writing time before her daughter woke up until the first draft was completed.
“This is the most disciplined I’ve ever been in my life, and it’s sort of not been fully repeated since,” she jokes.
One of the themes Nanami Strenner hopes readers explore after finishing “My Other Heart” is the question of nature versus nurture.
“From a parental point of view, that’s really interesting, because we know so much more now about the impact of parents on children as they grow up,” she says. “But also, ideal nature versus how everything else has shaped us, I think that’s a really interesting idea. That’s actually at the center of the book too.”
“Kit, for example, is a product of the society that she’s brought up in, but she knows the nature inside is slightly different, because she’s had this ambiguity about her background,” she continues. “And I think that’s something that people could really sink their teeth into.”
Nanami Strenner, who now lives in London, says she was trying a new pizza shop near her neighborhood when she found out her novel had been chosen for Jenna’s book club.
“My editor rang me and told me on the phone,” she says. “I just couldn’t believe it. I was definitely like jumping up and down on the ground and just saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!'”
Apart from some weird looks from her husband inside the restaurant before he knew what happened, she says it was “the most amazing phone call to receive.”
Nanami Strenner adds that she hopes “My Other Heart” brings readers back to their adolescence and all the feelings that came with that time.
“I hope people enjoy it and it makes them feel hopeful and transports them somewhere,” she says. “Because I know that’s what I always look for when I’m reading a novel.”
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