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

4.0

Hot take but I don't know that I loved the way this concept (a long letter to the narrator/author's mother) was carried out --I think it weakened the plot. But maybe that's the point, or rather, pointlessness: a reflection shouldn't have to have the traditional sine curve (or cosine curve?) of tensions and resolutions, and the timeline being fluid added to that sense as well as to the theme of intergenerational trauma. This is, as a project of love, profound. The writing itself makes this book a worthy read, and Ocean Vuong has some sentences in here that I still think about two years later.