Comment

Mar 26, 2017sgcf rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
The format of very brief vignettes on a single page with much white space made me think of a photo album. As each snapshot captured a moment in time of the first-person narrator’s life in Viet Nam, in a Malaysian refugee camp, and as an immigrant to Montreal, Canada, I could see the cruelty, misery and the beauty. But for me the erratic sequencing and the jumbled memories did not gel as a whole picture. Although Thuy’s prose is poetically lyrical with dramatic imagery, a quality that usually endears a book to me, it wasn’t enough.