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Reviews tagging 'Death'

Góry śpiewają by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

125 reviews

adventurous challenging dark hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I loved the look into the history of Vietnam through the generations. The characters and their stories were fully fleshed such that it reads more like a memoir than a historical fiction. 

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emotional sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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challenging sad tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Powerful story about three generations in North Vietnam: it goes back-and-forth between a young girl’s experience of the end of the Vietnam war, and her grandmother’s survival of the 1940s great hunger and harsh land reform, with the middle generation being portrayed either as children or soldiers.

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challenging dark reflective sad slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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challenging emotional hopeful sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

This is a moving book about intergenerational trauma as a result of events that happened in Vietnam between the French occupation, the Japanese occupation during WWII, the rise of communism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Nguyen Phan does not spare any details in sharing these stories and does a masterful job crafting the voices of the characters telling them. In interviews, Nguyen Phan has spoken about wanting to tell the stories that haven't been told in existing works. As someone who wasn't very familiar with Vietnamese history prior to reading this book, it has taught me about the resilience of the Vietnamese people, knowing that many today continue to carry these stories and trauma. 

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adventurous challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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emotional hopeful sad tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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dark emotional inspiring mysterious sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
challenging emotional sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

 It hurt to read this book and it hurts like hell to put it down and it’s one of these books that gives me a massive book hangover, the kind where I look at all my other novels and feel defeated because right now I just need to stop feeling.

The Mountains Sing is a story told by two interwoven voices. There’s a young girl in the 1970s at the close of the Vietnam war, who sees the grownups coming back from the front diminished, both mentally and physically, and who wonders if her parents will ever be back. In the meantime, she lives with her grandmother. The second part of the novel is set in the 1950s, just after the First Indochina War, when it’s hard to figure out whether one should flee the French or the Communists more, because both want her dead. It’s told by the grandmother, who tells her granddaughter what happened to their family twenty years prior.

I think it might be the first time that every chapter has me excited (?) for the next chapter in this voice. Both storylines were equally compelling and worked so well together. It was so good to read a book that wasn’t just about the Americans, but also about resisting the French and about having the hardest time “choosing sides” in a war that nobody wants to wage.

You can also read this review on my personal blog.

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