I don’t wanna yuck your yum but I reeeally didn’t like this book. It tried so hard to be something what it just wasn’t. I do think that there was some beautiful prose but it was just overdone and to me seemed pretentious after a while. I read a one-star review on goodreads that says: Beautiful prose can only get you so far and the more you stuff it in such a short novel, the more suffocated your reader feels.

I understand from other reviews that Vuong usually write poems. I can see how his writing style would work beautifully in a poem but I just don’t think it worked in a novel.