I’m not always a fan of books that change times in a life all the time. But the shippers here work as the author styles the story as a letter that rambles. He has some tough things to describe. Very well written. ( )

Coming out after waking up in Vietnam and trying to explain all of it to your illiterate mother who runs a nail salon. Culture shock and idiomatic language conspire to confuse the narrator and his family. Despite all odds, the stories get told and our world expands. What passes for a realistic tale is ennobled by mythic devotion. The reader is transformed by the beautiful and the damned. ( )

CW: I am particularly sensitive to animal suffering so one short description at about the 17% mark had me reeling. Here it is - It is a description of people eating a monkey's brain while the monkey is still alive which may or may not have been an actual practice. I stopped Googling because the results list contained videos and I just don't want to know if this used to happen or if it still occurs.. There are other content warnings too very detailed sex scenes, homomisia, physical abuse, descriptions of deaths of loved ones, rape recounted, drug use, drug overdose, racism

Well that was quite a beautifully written but often confusing novel.

At times I was stunned by the delicate and lyrical writing and at other times I thought it almost tipped over into purple prose, but in my opinion, the writing absolutely interfered with the flow of the story itself. It's like the story was a braided river, slipping this way and that, but mostly going in one direction so that you could sort of hold on to the main thread of what was happening. Little Dog was a wonderful narrator with such a raw honesty, however, I felt like I never got a chance to connect because the story veered away time and time again. That being said, it was largely a wonderful reading experience and I can see why it has such positive reviews. ( )

1 star solely for the amazing writing. ( )

NA ( )