How Much of These Hills is Gold

Lucy and Sam need to bury their Ba, but as poor Chinese orphans living in the American West just after the Gold Rush, no one wants to give them the needed silver dollars, and they must leave town.

At once a sweeping tale with a close focus on family, this debut novel shows a lot of promise. We mostly get the close third person of Lucy's point of view as she navigates her world, but we also get a glimpse of the family's backstory as well in what was my favorite part of the book. Beautiful descriptions, especially about the land, and wanting to know what would ultimately happen to Lucy kept me reading, though the tone is bleak and the plot a little disjointed. Not perfect, but an interesting story, and I'll definitely try another book by show more this author should she write more. show less

C Pam Zhang's debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, is a beautiful, roaming, aching novel about the promise of the American dream and what it means to find a home. Set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home.

These siblings, Lucy and Sam, 12 and 11, children of Chinese laborers, take their father's body on a journey through the California hills in the middle of the Gold Rush. The quest for burial, the family strife, the smell of death, the hot sun, the dust, the storms, all recall Faulkner. Ba (Mandarin for "dad") haunts the narrative as Addie Bundren did, first as voice and then ultimately as a corpse, awful, show more unwieldy, and decomposing.

“How Much of These Hills Is Gold” is an aching book, full of myths of Zhang’s making (including tigers that roam the Western hills) as well as joys, as well as sorrows. It’s violent and surprising and musical. It's a book that doesn't provide easy answers. And it's one that quietly confrontational. Zhang wants you to remember the forgotten Chinese laborers, the very laborers who helped build the transcontinental railroad. More importantly, Zhang wants you to realize that they belong to this land too, even if they quite don't feel that way and even if their own individual ideas of what constitutes a home, a body, etc. may differ.

Zhang characters are flawed. Ba, is one mean-spirited but well meaning individual. And Lucy, tragically in the end, might be looking for a home in all the wrong places. Zhang does interesting things with genre too - subverting the Western to talk about race, gender, sexual identity, poverty and pubescence.

Alongside Sam and Lucy’s family story are the stories of the genocide and persecution of Native Americans, the colonization of the west and the compulsive exploitation of the land by desperate settlers and greedy opportunists. This is not your American history course from high school. This is poetic truth.

How Much of These Hills is Gold, is a beautiful and daring debut novel from a promising novelist. The novel doesn't necessarily have a neat ending. It's up to you to decide if Lucy and Sam ever truly find a home to call their own. show less

Feminist Cormac McCarthy is the elevator pitch - and it’s not far off. Compelling throughout, even if I wasn’t too keen on the structure. I’ll definitely be looking out for Zhang’s next one.

C Pam Zhang’s stunning debut novel examines the myth of the American West from the vantage point of marginalized Chinese immigrants whose role in the California Gold Rush has rarely been acknowledged. The story begins in 1862 and focuses on two sisters Lucy,12, and Sam,11 (who identifies as male.) The children’s prospector/ miner father, Ba has died and the children whose mother had died earlier must bury him and survive. The book chronicles their struggle in a world defined by racism and poverty and moves back and forth in time providing the backstory of the children’s lives and the lives of their parents. The writing is lyrical and the characters are finely drawn. I came away with a deeper understanding of the Chinese- American show more experience and a fuller more complex picture of the history of the American West. show less

It's always a relief when a book I've been eagerly looking forward to reading doesn't disappoint.

[Mild spoilers (such as structure and setting changes) throughout, with additional spoilers behind tags.]

We begin with 12-year-old Lucy, newly responsible for 11-year-old Sam, who shows tendencies of being like their impulsive, abusive father...the father who has just died, leaving them orphans, penniless and at the mercy of everyone in their coal mining town who dislikes them for not looking like everyone else. So Lucy and Sam set off into the California wilderness with their father's body, looking for an appropriate place to bury a man whose prospecting dreams carried them all over the west without finding one place to call home.

Zhang show more evocatively paints a beautiful but dying land for their journey--a place where water has been poisoned, majestic buffalo and tigers have been driven to extinction, and mountains are being blasted to make way for railroads. The first section of the book is largely psychological, as Lucy grapples with what, if anything, she owes her dead father and emotionally distant Sam...with what makes a family and what makes a home. She doesn't look to the future, not when Sam's quest for the perfect place to bury their father seems like it might cost them their lives.

Part II takes us back several years, when Lucy and Sam still lived with their mother and father in a miserable hut in the coal-mining town. We meet a Ba whose prospecting dreams of striking it rich have been all but broken; a Sam who still has beautiful long hair but gravitates toward Ba; a Lucy who favors her mother in all but looks and whose intelligence intrigues the local intellectual-turned-schoolteacher; and a magnetic Ma who uses her beauty and strong will to keep the family fed, housed, and--in Lucy's case--educated. Money is next to nonexistent when Ma becomes pregnant...but then Ba reveals that he hasn't been spending evenings gambling away his earnings, and suddenly money becomes a worry in a very new way.

Most authors would have started with this section, but Zhang's choice to unspool Lucy and Sam's quest to bury their father first (instead of just as a prologue) gives Lucy an interesting psychological depth: if we know her mind when she's older, how did she get to be there in the first place? Zhang uses the early focus on Lucy's interior life to set up themes and images that will recur throughout the book--not only the words that serve as chapter headings (blood, water, meat, mud, etc.), but tigers, buffalo, the land, family, home, and (of course) gold--so that we're actively reading for them once we hit the more conventional A-to-B plot structure.

I fully expected to return to Lucy and Sam after showing us how Ma and Ba's hopes for a bright future go the way of most dreams in America, but Zhang surprised me with a step both forward and backward in time, with the ghost of Lucy's father telling her his story on the eve of his body's burial. It turns out that Ba isn't Chinese. He was an orphan raised on Californian soil by the surviving members of local tribes that had been decimated by European settlers. To him, any gold belongs to the people like them who grew up in those hills, and he decides to get some of his own. While working, he agrees to accompany Chinese laborers from seashore to mines--not realizing until they step off the boat that the boss assumes he can speak their language. Fortunately, he and Ma hit it off, learn each others' languages, and plot revenge on the bosses who lied to get cheap labor to agree to board their ship. Unfortunately, their revenge spirals out of control.

We skip ahead again, back to Lucy, several years after burying Ba. She's settled into a more comfortable life in town, working at hotels and acting as a kind of "kept friend" to a wealthy miner's daughter. She knows that comfort will soon be disrupted when her friend marries a man that Lucy knows better than she'd like, but then Sam returns after years of absence and complicates everything. Like Part II, this section would seem more conventional and linear if it weren't for what came before it.


Zhang also managed to surprise me with the ending. I actually put the book down for a couple days because I knew that things were going to turn sour and I didn't want to face them...but, like the nonlinear plot, the ending didn't go the way I expected it to. The result was much better than what I was expecting, at least in terms of storytelling. I'm once again curious to go pick up a copy of this book in the store, to see if the end is still the same as it is in this advanced reader's copy.

This was the rare book that lived up to my expectations, in large part because it was very much not what I expected (in large part because of the cover copy).

If you love character- and place-driven stories, I highly recommend How Much of These Hills Is Gold---and I look forward to seeing what Zhang writes in the future.

[This book deserves a quote roundup but after reading about 60 books this year (!) I'm getting review fatigue. 8-( Sorry. But also not--the language is beautiful, go read this one!] show less

As American of a story as there ever was, replete with that OG American Dream: striking it rich in the gold of the west. But more than finding gold, it's a novel about searching; sometimes it's a search for the right burial spot, sometimes for home (but what makes a home a home? our protagonists ask), and sometimes it's the search for yourself. And much like life, we're left with no conclusive ending to this story, except an acknowledgement that the search itself is on-going, and that, perhaps, is the point.

The highly stylized prose at times steps on its own feet and comes tumbling down these golden hills. This pulled me out of what would have been a compelling narrative on its own sans bells and whistles.

I didn't enjoy this book, but it was haunting. Lucy and Sam are orphaned sisters. They struggle to make their way in mid-19th century California. Sam does this by passing as a boy. Another reviewer characterized this book as Faulknerian and I think that is a good description. It is painful to listen to or read.