Reviews tagging 'Colonisation'

Góry śpiewają by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

42 reviews

adventurous emotional hopeful informative sad 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: No

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense 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

I loved this book! It has a good balance between historical reality and family fiction. The characters are dynamic and beautiful. A portrayal of hardship, hunger, death, war, violence, separation, family, grief and suffering. The story is intimate from the POVs of a grandmother (who lived through everything) and a granddaughter (who lived through the most recent). The stories of their family members, neighbors and friends are punctuated throughout. Difficult to read in its brutality and harshness. Covers the 1920s-1970s-Great Hunger, Land Reform and Viet Nam War. This novel brings the history of Viet Nam to life. 

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

Despite its difficult subject matter, The Mountains Sing is a book that I didn't want to put down. You are compelled to keep reading to find out what happened in the past and what fate will befall the characters that you've grown attached to. 

I really appreciated how the author explored war and its aftermath, both at a wider and at a more personal level (through the story of the Trần family). I think it did well in depicting all the contradictions and nuances in a country's history.   
My only minor complaint in terms of the plot is the big revelation in the final chapters; I found it a little bit melodramatic and fortuitous.

I wasn't completely captured by the writing style but, here and there, there were some touching moments elevated by the prose.

Overall, this is a gripping and powerful book that I would encourage everyone to pick up.

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challenging emotional hopeful informative 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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challenging emotional hopeful
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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challenging dark emotional informative 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: No

Loved it. So sad, so emotional, but it was also beautifully written and still hopeful/ uplifting. 

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

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challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective 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: Complicated

Wow. I’ve known about this novel for ages not least of all because I have many friends on Bookstagram who’ve raved about it for years. The truth is they just might have undersold it. This is a truly brilliant, compellingly-told multigenerational family saga that is filled with so much life and tragedy but yet so much hope for healing and reconciliation even in the face of hardship. 

First of all, I entered this book not knowing much about Vietnamese history beyond America’s interventionist role in it, the dispute in America around their own involvement, and the resultant mess left behind. To my knowledge, contemporary Vietnam is a gorgeous place that tourists visit and that is on my bucket list to go to. Yet outside of this perspective, I’d never really experienced Vietnam from its own perspective as the subject of its own story rather than through a Western lens. Knowing my own family’s experience of war and occupation in my own country, I know the story is never simple and not everyone will agree with this author’s approach to telling this story or perspectives on historical events as reflected through Huong and her grandmother, Diêu Lan. That said, from my perspective as an international reader, I think the author tells an eminently and universally human story where if we acknowledge the commonality of of our humanity, we will understand that there are no real winners in war. 

Diêu Lan is clearly the star of this book even if Huang’s voice remains strong throughout. Sometimes with books about characters that are resilient in the face of incredible trauma and hardship, the inspiration they provide as strong characters can simultaneously feel a little dismissive of the magnitude and impact of the suffering of others- sort of like “if Diêu Lan can move on and keep going, why can’t you? If she can forgive, something must be wrong with you that you can’t.” I think this book approaches this sensibly. Diêu Lan has Pollyanna ways, but she also feels deeply her grief and processes it through her faith. And through that faith, she’s also able to accept people (her children, for example) at different stages of grief and anger and PTSD without judgement and without insisting on her own approach or perspective. I loved how pragmatic she was but also how loving and how emotional. For me, her story was a coming of age story that revealed a lot about how much her family and the way she was raised set her up to face some of the challenges she did in her life. Huang’s story was a parallel coming of age story but more reflective of our journey as readers being novices in Vietnamese history or in Diêu Lan’s life and maturing as we read to a state of of not quite full adulthood, greater understanding of the multiplicity of perspectives and experiences that can be true and the commonality of suffering of everyday people in a war.

The language in this book was absolutely gorgeous, the use of proverbs and stories and viewing the world through a rich lens of culture and traditions, lent authenticity to the history we were reading. This was absolutely tragic but it never felt like grief porn, your heart was broken but in Diêu Lan’s resilience, it was healed again. Even in difficult moments, I was drawn to this and could hardly put it down. This is absolutely my favourite read so far this year and a new all time fave that will stick with me for a long time. I can’t recommend this enough.

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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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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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