moving and beautiful

I found myself getting lost here and there. Huge chunks of time are glossed over. Interesting story but not gripping.

One of the best books I’ve read to date. Zhang meticulously crafts a voracious, tangible story that you could place 200 years in the past or future, never truly answering when or where the novel takes place. And yet, we recognize so many motifs from life today - racial stereotypes, yearning, the struggle of being an immigrant, exclusion, family dynamics, grief. Zhang slowly unfurls a world full of bloodshed, fear and greed in a setting so well-described, I see it even now. Piece by piece we watch the novel link up and our understanding of the plot comes into view, though never linear and never certain.

However, as is reasonable in a debut novel, Zhang fumbles a bit with the plot line and errs on the flowery side in prose (though I love that style) leaving the reader to reread passages repeatedly and question what and where exactly things are going on. All is forgiven in this gripping novel that I recommend to everyone I meet.

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, 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.

4.5 stars. potentially the most vivid thing i've read this year. devoured whole.

found it kind of difficult to get into a first but due to my stubbornness not to DNF a book, carried on & glad that i did. informative about racism, gender, trauma & family and was a side of westerns that is often not told.

The beginning was as slow and tedious to get through as the journey the main characters take, but with each part more information and depth is added. By the end I really enjoyed the book, even with the sad, but still realistic ending.

I think this would be a good book to read in class, so i recommend 👍

Read this book

i think im going to throw up

I loved how I was immediately transported to the deserts of Northern California with this book. I also loved becoming better acquainted with the history and context of early Chinese immigration to the area.

In the end, I liked it. Something about the beginning half of the novel just did not click with me. The way Zhang chose the more poetic style and made it feel like an unending tragedy really took me out of feeling any emotion for any characters. I realize it is historical fiction and that these things likely did or certainly could have occurred in degrees. I just think that Zhang feeling the need to include a bullet-pointed list of the tragedies that struck the family in the small amount of time kind of sums up just how many bad things were made to happen for dramatic effect. But once the style changes, especially a kind of letter style chapter from Ba and then the more adult protagonists living their lives, I think it got a lot better. At least for me, the characters became more alive and got their own personalities. It's definitely worth a read if you like westerns and want something that isn't just a bunch of white men running around like cowboys. I'm curious to see what Zhang writes next, as their style may have evolved.

How much of these hills is gold is a novel set in the wild west of America, during the gold rush.  It looks at Chinese immigrants, who you'll probably have seen in films set during these times, building rail roads. We follow two siblings, who are trying to survive in this harsh world, and flash back to their earlier childhoods, and their parents. This isn't a light read, but was a very interesting look at a time that has been so documented from the white cowboys point of view. I enjoyed this book.  It's a overwhelming experience of a different time and place, but one that is well written, and takes out to the wild landscapes described.  It's a tale of siblings, their love, their rivalry, and their commitment to family, all set within a world that we've seen often in films and books.  It gives a lot of insights and gives a glimpse of what life was like.  How Much of These Hills is Gold  was published on 9th April 2020,  and is available to buy on  Amazon   and on   Waterstones .  The Waterstones link takes you to a signed edition!  I've found a  link  to where you can search for local bookshops, including independent! If you're interested in historical books from a different perspective, then I think you'd enjoy  The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins.  I was given this book for free in return for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to  Little, Brown Book Group and Virago  (the publishers) for this book. Check out my  GoodReads profile  for more reviews.

“Because though these dry yellow hills yielded nothing but pain and sweat and misplaced hope—she knows them. A part of her is buried in them, a part of her lost in them, a part of her found and born in them—so many parts belong to this land. An ache in her chest like the tug of a dowsing rod. Across the ocean the people will look like them, but they won’t know the shapes of these hills, or the soughing of grass, or the taste of muddy water—all these things that shape Lucy within as her eyes and nose shape her without.”

PROS: 1. The story itself--the plot and especially the characters--was great. Fascinating and fresh 2. The length of the book--though the pacing can be stagnant at times, because this book isn't particularly long, getting through it wasn't a slog. 3. The author's writing style shows a great deal of promise for some seriously beautiful writing in the future. 4. I really enjoyed reading a book from a time period and perspective I know nothing about. CONS: 1. The pacing was... questionable. There are sections that feel like they could've been left out and others that could've used some breathing space. 2. The author's lyrical writing was beautiful at times, but ham-fisted in others. The over-use of metaphor made it difficult to care about the beauty of the words when every other sentence contained something of that nature.

Couldn’t finish this. The concept and perspective were so promising but the writing style was just too difficult for me to get into. What she takes on with this book is audacious and–clearly based on other reviews–it’s a roaring success. But for me, it wasn’t a pleasant read.