Nov 10-24, 2019
This one was a challenge! What at first seemed a little self-indulgent on the author's part, soon became apparent that Vuong, most simply put, is a poet. People are raving of the beauty in his prose, and I can't disagree, but the sleepy, poetic quality really just disconnected me from the story and the protagonist. It was difficult to form any emotional investment around Little Dog, his mother, or his grandmother. The novel, written as a letter to Little Dog's illiterate mother, jumped in timeline and stories, but wasn't difficult to follow. The book boasts an "unforgettable revelation," and there were plenty of times that I thought I could see the foreshadowing on the wall, only to be wrong time and time again. Finally, for me, said revelation was a complete letdown, and so quietly revealed, that I nearly missed it.
"What were we before we were we?"(Beautiful, but not "the" revelation.) A bit of a slow burn with some excruciatingly graphic scenes; maybe a little too abstract for my tastes.
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