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4.12 AVERAGE
4.12 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
maybe if i shoot myself i can get over this book.
sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you have been ruined.
sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you have been ruined.
this feels like letters in my notes app that I wrote to my mother and that she'll never read
4.5
4.5
Vuong's story will touch your heart & mind. His sentences are brilliantly constructed and his word choices cleverly perfect. All writers will be better for reading this work, but writers who aspire to non-fiction should remain extra observant at his unswervingly honest voice. Parts were painful to read since I kept picturing the faces of my Vietnamese daughter-in-law & grandson, selfishly thankful their lives have been easier. Vuong is a strong testament of how persistence and hope can prevail, and beauty can be found everywhere. Thank you, Ocean Vuong, for sharing.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Gorgeous title. Gorgeous cover. Gorgeous novel. Ocean Vuong’s debut is as beautiful as it is devastating—an intimate exploration of family, love, and the weight of generational trauma.
Told as a letter from Little Dog, a Vietnamese American son, to his illiterate mother, the novel unfolds in fragments, reflecting the fractured nature of memory and survival. We piece together the lives of Little Dog, his mother Rose, and grandmother Lan—women marked by war, displacement, and survival—alongside his own story of first love with Trevor.
Vuong writes with a poet’s precision: sentences that shimmer with beauty even when describing brutality. It’s raw, luminous, and at times almost unbearably intimate. The narrative doesn’t hold your hand—it drifts, loops, and lingers—but that’s part of its magic.
This won’t resonate with every reader (the lyricism can feel pretentious if it doesn’t click for you), but for me, it was haunting. It left me scoured and raw, yet also reminded that beauty persists, even in the shadow of violence.
🌿 A book that lingers long after the last page.
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I just didn't click with the narrator. Also it being a novel but also heavily inspired by the authors life felt confusing, I kept forgetting it was fiction.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
could've done without the peculiar paragraph about islam in the last few pages of the book for no reason whatsoever that read as little more than 'let me show my diverse religious knowledge and mention god and the prophet three pages after writing about gay sex' but we can't all be winners
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes