Reviews with content warning for Sexual violence - Op aarde schitteren we even

I'm... very disappointed. This book was on my tbr for so long and I thought it was going to be emotional, sad, beautifully written and a just a little challenging to read because of the poetic writing and the fact that english is not my first language.
Well, it was definitely sad and indeed challenging to read, but the beauty of the writing, while it was there, seemed forced. As for the emotions, it didn't really give me many.
Vuong writes in a very lyrical way, and while that is not necessarily a bad thing, I thought it was too much more often that not. Some metaphors, comparisons and substituions of one perfectly suitable word or expression for a more "poetic" one were totally unnecessary. On other note, some descriptions were so unnecessarily graphic, almost forcefully graphic (which reminds me to warn potential readers to check the trigger warnings).
Also, I found myself infinitely waiting for the plot to develop, the characters to develop and... it just never happened (?) The characters lacked depth, at least from my point of view.
The good:
• The cover is gorgeous;
• The title is stunning;
• I liked the idea of writing a story in the form of a letter to the main character's mother (with the twist that the mother can't read);
• The writing was indeed beautiful in some parts;
• It covered some really relevant topics.

Content Warnings

florecita_lectora's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective slow-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? Yes

3.75

Content Warnings

marthabethanreads's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Content Warnings

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

Content Warnings