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libraryanned's review against another edition
5.0
Required reading for anyone, especially Minnesotans, who would like to understand the Hmong experience. The writing is readable and interesting and really helps you to understand the Hmong refugee experience in a personal way. I came away feeling like my world view was enriched.
juliaogden's review against another edition
5.0
Clearly, Kao Kalia Yang has inherited her masterful command of language from her father. This book made me cry in public over and over. Even the acknowledgments made me cry. But while there are devastating stories of loss, struggle, and inhuman suffering, it is the way she crafts words and images--sometimes in sadness, sometimes in beauty, often in love--that filled my heart into overflowing.
Read this book.
Read this book.
sophronisba's review against another edition
5.0
I did not think this was going to be my kind of book, but I fell in love with it. In this memoir, Yang attempts to tell her father's story from many perspectives, including his own. It is elegantly and imaginatively written, and by the end I felt I knew Yang's family nearly as well as my own.
egoenner's review against another edition
4.0
Beautiful. I found this story a little uneven, the shifts from Kalia's father's story to her story were bumpy sometimes. And, at the same time, there were passages of absolute beauty. Kalia's writing, again, is evocative and touching. The chapter in which her father describes his love for his wife is so beautiful--I won't soon forget it.
steph_ine's review against another edition
5.0
A beautiful, heartwrenching, human story about the refugee experience in America. A must read in today's political and social climate.
macshibby's review against another edition
4.0
This book presents an amazing personal history of the author's father, Bee, a Hmong refugee who fled Laos in the years following the Vietnam-adjacent Secret War in Laos. It's poetic, heartbreaking, and hopeful... and probably a whole bunch of other things. It was a pretty quick, satisfying read.
typewriterdeluxe's review against another edition
5.0
I read and enjoyed Kao Kalia Yang's book [book:The Late Homecomer|20758939], but I think this project is an even better fit for her strengths as a storyteller. Who better to write her song poet father's story than Kao Kalia Yang with her poetic, powerful language and her deep knowledge of him? And who better to read this book aloud than the author on audiobook? (I listened to this book on CD and highly recommend it!)
The stories in this book are full of painful truths-- horrors of war, loneliness caused by separation and death, pain caused by parenting shortcomings and personal disappointment, the struggle to survive in poverty, Minnesota racism, and capitalist abuse of factory workers. The stories in this book are also full of beauty, resilience, growth, and hope. And love. The creation of this book is so obviously a labor of love.
I heard this book described in an interview on MPR as a kind of monument to a seemingly-ordinary man for whom no one has erected a monument and whose history was not widely known.
"'No one wants to read a book about a man like me when you can read books about men like Barack Obama'," Yang remembers him saying. But she persisted. "My stubborn heart wanted to prove him wrong."
Thank you to her stubborn heart.
The stories in this book are full of painful truths-- horrors of war, loneliness caused by separation and death, pain caused by parenting shortcomings and personal disappointment, the struggle to survive in poverty, Minnesota racism, and capitalist abuse of factory workers. The stories in this book are also full of beauty, resilience, growth, and hope. And love. The creation of this book is so obviously a labor of love.
I heard this book described in an interview on MPR as a kind of monument to a seemingly-ordinary man for whom no one has erected a monument and whose history was not widely known.
"'No one wants to read a book about a man like me when you can read books about men like Barack Obama'," Yang remembers him saying. But she persisted. "My stubborn heart wanted to prove him wrong."
Thank you to her stubborn heart.
williamc's review against another edition
5.0
A brilliant and touching family memoir that serves as an excellent and essential companion to Yang's earlier book, [b:The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir|2541323|The Latehomecomer A Hmong Family Memoir|Kao Kalia Yang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1354209552s/2541323.jpg|2548852]. Together, the books tell powerful stories of identity, immigration, forced migration, assimilation, racism, and within one family, the complicated and slow process of Americanization that sees each child becoming more Western than the last, with the oldest sister Dawb in a particularly challenging role as the interpreter between her frustrated, powerless parents and the presumptions and expectations of a widely disinterested white America. Many of the stories Yang finds are impactful and delicately presented to capture a range of emotions, but never grasp for effect or charge the reader. I was deeply affected by this book, moreso than its predecessor, but they should be read together, as inseparable as sisters.
radlibrarianmama's review against another edition
5.0
I'm in love with her writing style. So lyrical and beautiful. I fell in love with her family instantly and didn't want to put the book down.