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hollymileham's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
i wanted and expected to love this but i just wasnt blown away at all. but the message is obviously really important and im glad to have read it
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse and Homophobia
elaa0907's review against another edition
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Homophobia, and War
mirandyli's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
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? It's complicated
5.0
Beautifully written and will probably make you cry.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Bullying, Cancer, Chronic illness, Cursing, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Homophobia, Mental illness, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Terminal illness, Xenophobia, Medical content, Grief, Death of parent, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Colonisation, War, and Classism
mepresley's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-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
5.0
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is brief and gorgeous, full of pain and violence and love, like a human life. Told almost in a series of vignettes, memories pieced together with reflection, the story Little Dog gives us is presented out of chronological order but with perfect resonance. It’s a love letter to his deeply flawed mother and his equally deeply flawed first boyfriend, Trevor, neither of whom will ever read it because the former is illiterate & never became totally fluent in English and the latter because he is dead , filled with the pain inflicted on him, but equally with the tenderness of flawed, beautiful people doing their best to escape what cages them, what hunts them.
Little Dog narrates the war in Vietnam that shaped his family, that he once thought birthed them, before he realized that they were born of beauty. He shows images of his grandmother, Lan, in war-torn Vietnam, facing soldiers with guns while holding the infant Rose--his mother--in a bundle, their lives spared, probably, because Rose was more white than yellow, her father an American soldier. We glimpse Rose and Paul falling in love--Paul, the man who chose to be Rose's father and Little Dog's grandfather, though Lan, forced to work as a prostitute to survive during the war, was already pregnant when they met. Little Dog's father hovers at the edges of the narrative, a man who beat his mother and was carried off in a police car, who brought his wages home in coins that made them feel rich, who took them to KFC with a coupon given to them by a cashier at Goodwill.
He shows us his childhood, filled with a mother who was overworked and whose job at the nail salon taught her to say sorry as part of her identity, part of her livelihood, lessons Little Dog carried into his own first job, working underage among illegal immigrants harvesting tobacco, and paid under the table. A childhood colored by his schizophrenic Lan, as with the night that he awoke to fireworks that she thought were an air raid, and the two of them crouched together, hiding from the enemy, but also as with the day that she spotted purple flowers across a fence separating the path from the highway, sending Little Dog over to gather them, helping him back across, creating a windowsill garden & a secret that bonded them, Lan's finger to her lips as she told Rose they found the flowers discarded by a florist, the night he came home after having penetrative sex with Trevor for the first time, wet from the river they bathed in, and Lan told him that he had been on a long journey but they wouldn't speak of it so that the pirates couldn't find him.
A childhood shaped around his mother's pain, her abuse of Little Dog, but also the two of them walking the mall with squares of chocolate that felt decadent, filling a cart at Goodwill on yellow tag day when everything was an additional 50% off, reaching across a divide to touch each other and share truths even when they cut--in the bakery, when Little Dog comes out to his mother and she tells him that he had a brother, aborted before he was born, because they could not afford to feed him.
A young adulthood of choosing his own pain, in the form of Trevor, who could not accept his own homosexuality, and who was himself broken by an abusive father, a culture who taught him to hate himself and deny his own existence as a gay man, an addiction to Oxycontin turned heroin, stemming from an ankle injury when he was just 14 years old, dying of an overdose at 22.
The narrative ends with Trevor's death and its aftermath interspersed with Lan's death and its aftermath, with Little Dog's goodbye to his first doomed love echoed by Paul's graveside goodbye via video chat to his own doomed first love, the former sundered by preventable addiction and the latter by war & the machinations of his family.
Throughout the text, Little Dog returns again and again in powerful ways to a few animal images: the monarch butterflies and their yearly migration; macaque monkeys, whose heads were broken open while they were still alive so their brains could be ingested as a cure for impotence; baby calves kept in close cages for their entire short lives so that their meat would be more tender and delicious; and buffalo, an entire herd, stampeding over a cliff, one after the other. Seeing the image on TV, Rose asks Little Dog why the buffalo do that, watching those before them fall to their deaths and doing the same thing, a question that Little Dog, in turn, poses to Trevor, who tells him that it's not a choice they make, just nature. Vuong chooses to leave us with only this answer, which is also the answer of why people repeat the same patterns, intergenerational trauma in action, friends dying by the handfuls of ODs. Googling the question after finishing the book, I find that the true answer is just as perfect for the novel: buffalo stampede when threatened and Native Americans harnessed this knowledge to kill the buffalo in droves. Like the Vietnamese immigrants in this story, like the forgotten poor of the neighborhood where Little Dog grew up--and so many identical neighborhoods (places where people don't ask "how are you?" because the responses are already known and overflowing with loss and pain and unmet needs, but instead "what's good?" because good, however small it is, can be good enough, because freedom is always relative, and calves are the most free in the short moments between their cage being opened & being led to the slaughter), like queer people, the buffalo run off the cliff because they are hunted.
Little Dog narrates the war in Vietnam that shaped his family, that he once thought birthed them, before he realized that they were born of beauty.
He shows us his childhood, filled with a mother who was overworked and whose job at the nail salon taught her to say sorry as part of her identity, part of her livelihood, lessons Little Dog carried into his own first job, working underage among illegal immigrants harvesting tobacco, and paid under the table. A childhood colored by his schizophrenic Lan, as with the night that he awoke to fireworks that she thought were an air raid, and the two of them crouched together, hiding from the enemy, but also as with the day that she spotted purple flowers across a fence separating the path from the highway, sending Little Dog over to gather them, helping him back across, creating a windowsill garden & a secret that bonded them, Lan's finger to her lips as she told Rose they found the flowers discarded by a florist, the night he came home after having penetrative sex with Trevor for the first time, wet from the river they bathed in, and Lan told him that he had been on a long journey but they wouldn't speak of it so that the pirates couldn't find him.
A childhood shaped around his mother's pain, her abuse of Little Dog, but also the two of them walking the mall with squares of chocolate that felt decadent, filling a cart at Goodwill on yellow tag day when everything was an additional 50% off, reaching across a divide to touch each other and share truths even when they cut--in the bakery, when Little Dog comes out to his mother and she tells him that he had a brother, aborted before he was born, because they could not afford to feed him.
A young adulthood of choosing his own pain, in the form of Trevor, who could not accept his own homosexuality, and who was himself broken by an abusive father, a culture who taught him to hate himself and deny his own existence as a gay man, an addiction to Oxycontin turned heroin, stemming from an ankle injury when he was just 14 years old, dying of an overdose at 22.
The narrative ends with Trevor's death and its aftermath interspersed with Lan's death and its aftermath, with Little Dog's goodbye to his first doomed love echoed by Paul's graveside goodbye via video chat to his own doomed first love, the former sundered by preventable addiction and the latter by war & the machinations of his family.
Throughout the text, Little Dog returns again and again in powerful ways to a few animal images: the monarch butterflies and their yearly migration; macaque monkeys, whose heads were broken open while they were still alive so their brains could be ingested as a cure for impotence; baby calves kept in close cages for their entire short lives so that their meat would be more tender and delicious; and buffalo, an entire herd, stampeding over a cliff, one after the other. Seeing the image on TV, Rose asks Little Dog why the buffalo do that, watching those before them fall to their deaths and doing the same thing, a question that Little Dog, in turn, poses to Trevor, who tells him that it's not a choice they make, just nature. Vuong chooses to leave us with only this answer, which is also the answer of why people repeat the same patterns, intergenerational trauma in action, friends dying by the handfuls of ODs. Googling the question after finishing the book, I find that the true answer is just as perfect for the novel: buffalo stampede when threatened and Native Americans harnessed this knowledge to kill the buffalo in droves. Like the Vietnamese immigrants in this story, like the forgotten poor of the neighborhood where Little Dog grew up--and so many identical neighborhoods (places where people don't ask "how are you?" because the responses are already known and overflowing with loss and pain and unmet needs, but instead "what's good?" because good, however small it is, can be good enough, because freedom is always relative, and calves are the most free in the short moments between their cage being opened & being led to the slaughter), like queer people, the buffalo run off the cliff because they are hunted.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Animal death, Cancer, Child abuse, Death, Domestic abuse, Homophobia, Mental illness, Blood, Grief, Colonisation, and War
zmcma13's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child abuse, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Homophobia, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Sexual content, and Violence
Moderate: Cancer and War
nerdyqueer's review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.5
One of the most heartbreaking and intense books I've ever read.
Content Warnings
Minor: Drug abuse, Homophobia, and Suicide
kelsreadsthings's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Homophobia, Racism, and Sexual content
phantasmfiend's review
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug use, Gore, Mental illness, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexual content, Violence, Grief, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and War
Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Bullying, Domestic abuse, Homophobia, and Physical abuse
Minor: Cancer and Car accident
brassnbooks's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Solid four star book that combines the deep past with a more recent past and perhaps a present
The formatting of the book is what makes it most enjoyable as it's broken in three parts and especially in the third where it gets almost or exactly poetry like is beautiful
All the people in the story have such a depth to them that you wonder where the story is leading the entire time
And as it is a letter to the mother also pulls me in
The formatting of the book is what makes it most enjoyable as it's broken in three parts and especially in the third where it gets almost or exactly poetry like is beautiful
All the people in the story have such a depth to them that you wonder where the story is leading the entire time
And as it is a letter to the mother also pulls me in
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Death, Drug abuse, and Sexual content
Moderate: Domestic abuse, Homophobia, Racism, Grief, Abortion, and War
that_reader's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Death, Drug use, Homophobia, Racism, Sexual content, and Suicide
Minor: Bullying, Cancer, Mental illness, Terminal illness, Grief, and War