A review by catymart83
The Boat by Nam Le

4.0

I really liked this book; several of the stories were profoundly affecting. While I don't neccessarily subscribe to the hype that this collection of short stories have been getting, I nonetheless understand why so many people love this book. My favorite stories were "Meeting Elise," the story of a father trying to meet up with his daughter who he hasn't seen in more than a decade. The language in this story was graceful and haunting and I suggest reading this collection just for this one alone. My two other favorites were "Halfhead Bay" and the title story "The Boat" about a teenaged boy and the consequences of falling for a girl already attached and a dangerous journey of a 16 year old girl from Vietnam to an unknown land by a dangerously overcrowded boat after the Vietnam War ended, respectively. Nam Le's stories are never about the literal meaning of its words; they're about the underlying meaning and feelings of it characters and character's actions. This is readily apparent in "Halfhead Bay" which while seemily about a boy and his crush on a girl, is actually about a father's expectations of his son and the slow erosion of a family when a parent is dying from a protracted illness. While I truly loved a lot of the stories I believe that one story ("Hiroshima") should have been excised from the final collection. That story was just filler; it just did not rise to the caliber of the other stories included in "The Boat." "Hiroshima" was full of useless details with no plot to speak of; it just distracted from the rest of these amazing stories.