Reviews
eARC provied by NetGally in exchange for an honest review but I've been and will always be a procastinator so... Considering this is debut work, I appreciate the author’s effort to highlight the post-American War struggles Vietnamese-Americans went through. But the narrative didn’t do it justice for me. All three main characters felt one-dimensional, each having seemingly only one personality trait to cling onto and to revolve their character around, therefore they lack depth. They didn’t have their own coherent plotlines to follow either, the events were just very random and didn’t significantly affect their personalities. So without a decent storyline and any rather well-built characters, I was left to be disappointed. I don’t have issues with the author’s English writing, but his usage of foreign words and phrases kinda pissed me off. So many of these Vietnamese words felt redundant and unnecessary. They didn’t show any meaningful cultural details but many were just there for being Vietnamese words. The same goes for the French phrases. If it wasn’t for me having a decent enough knowledge of all these three languages, I would have DNF-ed it a long time ago. And most of them never came with an explanation or translation! If Eric Nguyen meant this fictional experience to be shared and to be empathized by other readers, he should’ve made it more accessible to them. In conclusion, this was a very flawed book. But debut works usually have flaws. And I believe in Eric Nguyen to show improvement in his next projects.
Hương, Tuấn, and Ben are strong characters- the kind where it gets difficult to remember they don't actually exist outside of the story. I found something deeply relatable in each one of them, and I was a bit upset that the book was really over, when I got to the end. This book made me reflect quite a bit on my relationships with my own mother, and my sister, and how disconnected I am to my own heritage. Things We Lost To The water became an instant favourite, and that's not a label that I hand out easily. I hope to see more from Nguyen.
Thank you to Netgalley, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and Eric Nguyen for the ARC in exchange for a review This story follows a family who escapes Vietnam and immigrates to New Orleans. We see the struggles of the family trying to find familiarity while surviving in a foreign country. Written in Own Voice, this story really shows the dynamic of each character with their struggles and growth. The writing is amazing and although the story was a bit rushed at the end, everything as a whole was well put together. The story is close to my heart as the family immigrating here with their struggles and challenges are too realistic for me. The upbringing of the kids with the mother's hopes and expectations made me remember some things about my childhood. I think this is an amazing book to have some insight and perspective, although this is a fictional story most of it was realistic for me as it brought up some old memories about the war. I had to take some time to digest and process this book as again it was too real. I felt melancholy after finishing this book but overall still amazing and beautiful!
What is the human cost of war — not just in needless deaths, but in futures that could have been? Children robbed of the chance to know mothers and fathers, lives forever marked by trauma from harsh journeys to strange and often inhospitable new lands, creative and intellectual potential lost in the struggle just to survive one day at a time. A melancholy sense of loss runs like a current through Eric Nguyen's remarkable debut novel about a young mother named Huong who flees from a wartorn Vietnam to New Orleans in the 1970s and the lives that she and her two sons lead there over the next few decades. Nguyen is an incredibly gifted writer. There were many parts of this book where I was struck by the beauty of the prose. It's also not easy to write convincingly from the perspective of a young child, and Nguyen manages to do this with graceful adeptness. Although I didn't feel that we really got to know the characters that well, I loved the overall narrative and eagerly look forward to Nguyen's next book.
