A review by cmarie1665
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler

4.0

Other than "The American Couple," I loved this story collection. (The American Couple was one of the most boring stories I have ever read, and at 70 pages, it was a very long, very boring story). While I feel like there's a risk of appropriating another culture's story, I also think a good fiction writer can portray human nature, despite his or her cultural background, and the idea that Butler can't write from a Vietnamese point of view, to me, seems to come from a problematic assumption about the Other. If Butler is a keen observer of human nature, why can't he write well from any point of view he wants to?