“A sweet love story of self-discovery and mutual support” ( Kirkus Reviews ), this slice-of-life companion to A Pho Love Story follows two Vietnamese American students who find themselves at a crossroads—between family expectations, personal identity, and relationships. To his friends back home, Viet Ho is calm and collected and a lovable oddball who nurses an obsession with forensic science. He’s relieved to escape to UC Davis and escape from being caught between his feuding bickering immigrant parents. But with the whirlwind of campus life and the weight of his depression pressing in, Viet begins to wonder if he can truly outrun the version of himself he left behind. Evie Mai is the classic overachiever: a junior biology major, model eldest daughter, and girlfriend to a charming, well-connected future doctor. But while her résumé is flawless, her relationship is fraying—and she’s starting to question whether the future she’s worked so hard for is one she actually wants. Hoping to reconnect, she and her boyfriend both join a student-run clinic, but the experience reveals just how out of sync they’ve become. When an awkward accident throws Viet and Evie together, a friendship sparks over shared memories, late-night conversations, and quiet support neither of them knew they needed. As their bond deepens, so does the pull between them—challenging everything they thought they knew about love, family, and what it means to belong. A slow-burn romance that is tender and quietly powerful, Solving for the Unknown is about stepping off the path you were told to follow—and finding something unexpectedly beautiful in the process. Loan Le is the author of Solving for the Unknown and A Pho Love Story , a YA rom-com that earned praise from NPR, PopSugar , Bustle , Bon Appetit , USA TODAY , and BuzzFeed . She published her YA speculative short story in the anthology Firsts & Lasts . Loan is also a senior editor at Atria Books, where she acquires genre-bending adult fiction. When she isn’t writing young adult novels, she’s making sourdough bread, trying to keep her plants alive, watching true crime documentaries, and working on her adult novel. Visit her website at WriterLoanLe.me and find her on X @LoanLoan and Instagram @LoanLoanLe. Chapter 1: Vi?t CHAPTER 1 VI?T All Vietnamese kids understood that the stork story could never apply to them. Sure, the idea was great. Vi?t even thought it was comforting that a majestic bird could have carried him in its secure beak before delivering him home. Unfortunately, Vi?t’s real origin story, according to his parents, was that they found him in some trash can, with ants crawling over him—an embellishment they liked to add before uncontrollably laughing. Vi?t’s parents learned their jokes from their parents, which basically meant they didn’t learn how to tell jokes at all. As he grew older, Vi?t realized he was carefully planned, like everything else in his parents’ lives. They waited to have him until their wholesale distributor business in Westminster was stable. But since that took years and years, his parents had more gray hair than other parents of classmates his age. Especially the ones here. Vi?t’s mom and dad never experienced college life or move-in day; they didn’t know what to expect, so they looked unusually lost as they stood in the Tercero parking lot at UC Davis, surrounded by other incoming freshmen and their families rushing from their cars to the dorms. “I’ll get my welcome packet. I’ll be back,” Vi?t said just as his parents started whisper-arguing. The minute he turned, he exhaled. He should be used to this—all their arguments. During the car ride, beneath the crooning of Vietnamese ballads, his parents blew up at each other after Ba took a wrong turn. Suburban areas turned rural, then back to suburban and then eventually, the town and the campus was a mixture of the two. When they finally reached the parking lot, his mom came out of their van scowling. A familiar, uneasy feeling swelled inside Vi?t. With him gone, how were they going to survive each other? At the check-in table, upperclassmen Student Housing volunteers were way too peppy, but their energy was contagious, so Vi?t’s wariness waned, and the excitement that started up last night returned. He was here, finally. A volunteer handed him a twenty-minute unloading pass and a thick folder containing plans for this week’s Aggie Orientation. Soon enough, other leaders redirected his father to park closer to the curb outside Laben Hall and helped them unload the trunk. The students were surprised when M? also got to work immediately. His mom was barely five feet and might look like she knitted for fun, but in reality, she was weight-lifting crates of fresh produce all over Bolsa every day. Laben Hall was sandwiched between Campbell and Kearney. Inside the dorm, the air was ripe with Lysol, flowery perfumes, and pungent cologne. The hallways were narrow, walls covered by