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

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Reviews tagging 'Miscarriage'

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

64 reviews

higherwvrlvck's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense medium-paced

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

5.0

Language, which is beautiful and should be celebrated, can be something shameful for immigrants in America. Besides maybe their appearance, their mother tongue is what singles them out from all the rest. Little Dog's mother says "You're already Vietnamese" as a warning to her son. He must try as much as he can to stay invisible in order to stay alive.

This novel was heartbreaking. Although the primary story was about the main character, Little Dog, his mother, Rose, and his grandmother, Lan, it was also about his friend and lover, Trevor, his grandfather, Paul, and the character of the town Hartford, Connecticut and all those people it contained.

I read this book in about three to four days. Once I began, I could not stop. Vuong's language is captivating for both its beauty and relentlessness. Ocean Vuong puts on display the pain and the joy of having an immigrant mother who suffered through the Vietnamese War and domestic abuse. Vuong examines different standards of sexuality and masculinity in Little Dog and Trevor. He expresses resistance, his anger in words but continually recognizes language's failure to fully capture everything we want to say.

Stories by people of color tend to have this expectation of the characters of color be heroes, pick themselves up by the bootstraps, fight back, and achieve success, but Vuong simply tells it the way it is. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous depicts Asian American life from an Asian American voice. This should be enough. Bodies of color are not just faces for a movement, but lives worthy of being documented in Literature. Ocean Vuong does just this.

There are many, many topics of discussion in this novel. Depending on the emotional maturity of students, I think this would be a wonderful book to use in a high school world literature class and of course could be used in college curricula. I have heard many teachers argue that we don't read as many works by people of color because of time and lack of literary achievement, but Ocean Vuong has done both in this debut novel. I will forever cherish this story, and I can't wait to come back to it again.

Content Warnings