Reviews with content warning for Bullying - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

257 reviews

sadiaa's review

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3.0

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grcompain's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad tense fast-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

4.0

Vuong’s story is as deep and captivating as his writing style. This was a beautiful and heartbreaking story that keeps you down allowing you to come up for only brief and humorous pockets of air. This story was real and vivid. The writing was very poetic and the imagery provided, drops the reader right into the scene in the best and worst ways. I personally disliked the amount of the gruesome and gory details (animal abuse and body horror) which of course added emotional value but also distracted from the rest of the page. I found my mind stuck on horrible images long after turning the page. This book is beautiful and fearlessly describes the gorgeous, and the terrible.

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pastelmeganes's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional inspiring 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? Yes

5.0

Ocean Vuong is a brilliant poet and you can see it in his writing. There are so many good quotes from this book and his perspective and reflection on his Vietnamese identity and how that intersects with his status as a first generation child of a poor single mother as well as his struggles with his sexuality are conveyed with such thought provoking idioms, metaphors and similes that it requires you to try and encapsulate the true feelings he is trying to convey to his mother. He paints such vivid images with his mastery of the english language. His work envoked many emotions within me that i never reflected on. I would adore reading another book by him; I know he writes poems mainly but his work here was just so breathtaking and tantalizing and left me craving either another memoire in the future about his life again OR a work of fiction. This book was so simple gorgeous.

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mahaofhyrule's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

I really wish I could give this more stars, because at its core I think the message of this story is heartbreaking in the most beautiful way. However, as a story, I wasn't the most engaged reader.

The narrative is told through the POV of Little Dog, who is a Vietnamese immigrant boy writing a letter to his illiterate mother, who is suffering from trauma from the Vietnam War. On this premise alone, I was intrigued to get right into this story.

Let me start off by saying that Ocean Vuong is a great writer. His prose is definitely one of the stronger aspects of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous which of course is a given since he is a poet after all! There were a number of quotes I marked with sticky notes while I was reading because I had a feeling they would stick me for a long time, and I truly felt like I was present in some scenes described throughout the novel.

I was pretty hooked during the beginning, however, I started to feel more disengaged towards the middle of the book. I personally don't really read poetry that much (rarely, in fact), so I think I just felt disconnected from the writing style and it made me realize I'm probably not Vuong's target audience. I could not engage with the flowery language and I felt like because I'm not a poetry reader that a lot of the "beauty" of this work went completely over my head.

This story is supposed to be a letter, and Little Dog recaps various events at different stages of his life, and here's where I experience another issue: the events are completely scattered. What I mean by that is that one moment, he's describing a time when he was a child following another boy on the playground, and then after, he's describing another moment where he's with his dying grandmother (it wasn't these two specific moments, but hopefully you get the point). Anyway, because of how these events were framed, it not only confused me often and took me out of the story, but also ruined some tension of otherwise very emotional moments.

I'm not sure what else to say here. I feel like this caters to a very specific reader and unfortunately that reader is not me.

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mariavdl's review against another edition

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emotional sad

3.0

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luliloveslulo's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective 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? It's complicated

5.0

The tone of this book is so poetic, it can guide you to flow through even the most difficult passages.

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readwithev's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective 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

5.0

Vuong is amazing as expected. I read Night Sky with Exit Wounds and I’m not disappointed with this. It’s not only a love letter to his childhood in Hartford CT, but to his family. It’s a search for identity, a reckoning with the past, finding joy even in fleeting things, and all of life in between. I cried and smiled but was also left so stunned. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is poetic, thoughtful, empathetic, reflective, but also full of rage, grief, and yearning.
We watch Little Dog fall in love, watch him be bullied, but also grow into himself, like skin that he would grow into. It’s beautiful and I cannot recommend enough!

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