Review: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

goodreads summary

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

It’s hard to talk about this book and do it the justice it deserves. I think that’s why it took me almost four months to draft and publish a review for this book.

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is Ocean Vuong’s first book in the world of fiction. Categorizing this book as a piece of fiction is limiting in what it really is and that’s a work of poetic art.

This is such a tiny book, I think it’s a little under 250 pages, and Ocean Vuong packs so much depth, meaning, beauty, sadness, and horror in such a minimalistic yet heavy manner. This book had the most raw, vulnerable writing I’ve ever read. Every single sentence, word, and letter he chose to fill up a page with is done with intention. There are no tangents or circles, just straight lines of meaning and purpose that start off from the beginning of the page and end up straight through your heart.

Ocean Vuong started off his journey in the literary world as a poet and it really shows in this book. He uses a lot of metaphors and imagery that made the book so much more enjoyable and meaningful. I really enjoyed the significance of the names in this book, Little Dog, Rose, and Orchid. These represent their identity so perfectly well and I love how Ocean builds the story around the names in both subtle and non-subtle ways.

This book is a letter that Little Dog writes to his mother, Rose, who cannot read English. In his letter, he takes us through his upbringing as an immigrant child and how he grew from a boy to a man. He takes us through the happy moments with his mother and grandmother to the not so happy moments that are tainted by the war they thought they managed to escape when they fled Vietnam.

This book is an anecdotal exploration of war trauma, both the mental and physical kind, and how it doesn’t just affect the generation who’s lived or suffered through it, but the generations that follow. This book covers horrifying, very hard to read, things that went happened in Vietnam, so if you’re sensitive to animal cruelty, I highly recommend being aware of it before going into this book as there is one chapter where it’s mentioned.

While this is a book about Little Dog and his journey and his narrative that he’s trying to share with his mother, we also get to learn about and follow the stories of Little Dog’s mother and his grandmother.

I absolutely loved the grandmother in this book. I loved reading about Orchid in present time but also the little snippets of the past where we got to see her navigate falling in love and birthing a child in a war torn country. It was so beautiful to see how her strength and determination to survive transitioned through each decade as she went from being a little girl to being a young woman, a mother, a grandmother, and finally an immigrant. Reading about Little Dog’s mother, Rose’s, calloused hands and her struggle with PTSD and raising a child in a country she doesn’t understand was done so well. This book was just full of strong women and I loved it.

I know that I used the word “meaningful” a lot in this book but I think that if I could describe this book with a single word, it has to be “meaningful”. Growing up as a child of an immigrant, a child who never felt like he belonged in the country he immigrated to or the country he was raised in, a child who has endured such unimaginable physical and emotional trauma from his family’s past and his own present, Little Dog’s letter to his mother was one written out of desperation. It felt like Little Dog finally opened the door he tried to keep shut between his mother and him for decades and every feeling, every thought, every bit of happiness and despair he couldn’t translate to his mother in real time, just poured onto the page. There was no room for anything but purpose and meaning because for so long, he circled around the truth.

This book made me cry, many, many times. It made me want to love my family and our journey a lot more loudly. While I definitely can’t relate to all that Ocean’s story encompasses, there’s so much I do relate to as a first generation American of immigrants. The discussions on the constant disconnect we have with our family and our roots, the walls that we’re so used to having up around us, the sacrifices, and the grief of constantly having to redefine belonging and acceptance is all too familiar. There are many books that go over themes like that, but none have done so in a way that left me raw and breathless as Ocean Vuong did.

As mentioned before, this book has many, many trigger warnings. Please check and do your research before going into it.