A review by _forestofpages
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

 This started out so great and then lost me toward the end. I was skimming and the only reason I can think of why is because it stopped making sense. There was a lot of construction at the start, when he was a child, it was focused and moving forward with smaller vignette stories about his mother and grandmother which were great and relevant. Then he started talking about animal abuse and things got very abstract with two boys singing a choir song over a bloody child in the woods. I didn’t understand most of those parts. 

There was more of that near the end with pages and pages of singular lines that read like shower thoughts instead of letters to his mother. Also if he’s writing letters to his mother why would he write her about extremely sexually explicit times with a closeted boy? To each their own, but I doubt his mother would have wanted to read that even if she could, especially considering her homophobia. Good for him for opening up so deeply and allowing strangers to see the most vulnerable cracks like that, but to specifically tailor that for your mother seems strange to me. I kept feeling, especially toward the end as though it should have been a poetry collection not a novel. The early parts felt more like an essay collection, or a literary novel (it tittered between the two often) but toward the end it really lost it’s sense of direction. I just felt disjointed reading it, especially that last 3rd of the book. I do love Ocean Vuong's prose and will be picking up his poetry collections in the future. 
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