Reviews tagging 'Animal death'

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

346 reviews

erikalv97's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book is beautifully written, the story is enthralling, I could hardly put the book down. 

I loved the writer’s style, the constant change of tenses, narration and the really thorough descriptions. 

The story itself is hard hitting, I cried several times (please check the cw!!!!)
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smillas_tales's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

I had heard nothing but rave reviews of this book prior to reading it, and it truly deserves it! It’s a work of art, although it’s not a new favorite of mine.

Ocean Vuong is a poet, and it shows clearly in this debut novel. It is filled to the brim with flowery writing and metaphors, and every sentence has clearly been crafted with the utmost care! I love beautiful writing, and some passages gave me full-body chills. That being said, it did get a little too much for my liking at times, as some paragraphs were teetering on the edge of being incomprehensible.

I loved the topics explored in this story, and Vuong’s personal inspiration in this story makes it even more hard hitting. The book is deeply rooted in reality, with many references to real people and events, and this really helped emphasize the reality of the horrible situations depicted.

While I enjoyed the book, and found the format interesting, I personally prefer more structured narratives, where this felt more like a series of interconnected essays. But even though I didn’t fully love it, I still very highly recommend this novel!
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snoutsiru's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful 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? It's complicated

4.75

really really liked it
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kpignuolo's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

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fatherflapjack's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad 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? It's complicated

5.0

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smol_berry's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

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koreanlinda's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

If you can fill a book with sorrow, this would be it. There are glimpses of joy here and there, but they only exist to resist against and survive from the deep sorrow that pulls in everyone around. Sorrow takes its root in the novel’s melodramatic pessimism: we are all trapped in our lives, and living is our constant attempt at escaping it. Who am I to judge though? If I lived the life of Little Dog, or Ocean Vuong, I might have thought the same. 

I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey. (p.4)

All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there,… But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough. (p.216)

This book fails at being a novel in a traditional sense. It is more of pieces of experiences, observations, and contemplation written most poetically and strewn together into one binding. It has its minimal structure in loosely chronological order: three parts of Little Dog’s life in childhood, adolescence, and after college. If you look for a clear storyline, you quickly get lost. It’s more effective to absorb each chapter as a lump of colors, senses, and emotions. 

I am a daughter of a working-class immigrant family. What I witness in people’s lives in this fictional Hartford, CT easily disqualifies my family of that title. These people are not working-poor, they are working-dirt-poor. When we just landed in the farthest corner of Staten Island (also the farthest corner of NYC), my family lived in a side door of a multi-family house with a low ceiling and two small windows. Yet we were never starved. We were not subjected to physical violence by others or each other. We were never exposed to substance abuse or fallen into never-ending drinking. 

Yet there are parts where I see myself in Little Dog’s life. I suffered from my mother’s beating when I was young, and her psychological abuse lasted a lot longer. She got a job at a nail salon, which used to be dominated by all those women new from Korea, and now taken over by those from Vietnam. 

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat. 

My mother often cried and drank soju after work while spitting out stories from the salon. I wanted to tell her to quit her job, but I couldn’t. What else could she do? While spending most of her waking hours there, my mother formed her ideas of people living in the United States: poor Asians and Latinas were allies; well-off Whites had everything that they didn’t earn. I completely understood her initial distrust in my White partner when he tried to enter our family.

A side note to readers who get triggered by the content of animal abuse: skip pages 38-39, 41, 43-44. There is also a talk about veal calves trapped in cages on p.216. It is short but renders an inaccurate analogy of comparing the limited freedom of the three main characters to that of the calves. The lives of Trevor, Lan, and Rose are indeed limited by their environment beyond their control, but the range of their free will is significantly bigger than that of a veal calf. Also, the veal calves never become a perpetrator of violence themselves, unlike humans. 

Review by Linda (she/they) in Jan. 2022
Twitter @KoreanLindaPark
Letter writer at DefinitelyNotOkay.com 
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annajanen's review against another edition

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emotional 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? Yes

5.0

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paperbackparker's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

The structure of this book became increasingly frustrating to me, but damn, did that ending ever make me cry.

Really don’t understand why descriptions of animal cruelty had to pop up so often though.
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darbo's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring 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

I. Love. This. Book.
The beautiful and literate way Vuong always weaves in and out of referencing past pages, finding metaphors and allegories for everything he describes; and even the references he makes are just so dazzling and elegant. I'd even go so far as to call this magical and truly stunning, in the most literal sense of the word. I'm not kidding when I say that this book gave me more goosebumps at every page turn than movies or music have.
The portrayal of life in Vietnam, stigmatized life in America as a Vietnamese, and the life they're being forced to lead due to social prejudices and said stigmata is just so so heartbreaking; how his 'Ma' cannot read and how he's having to read everything to and for her, but the way he then creates white lies about some things to make it easier for her is super super poignant and touching; and the fact that it's in dedication to Ocean Vuong's actual mother is just super sincere, mindful, charming and dare I say it, gorgeous. This was one of the easiest 5-stars I've ever given a book. My compliments to the chef. I'll definitely read anything and everything Ocean Vuong publishes. Highly recommend it!
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