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gxuosi's Reviews (390)
absolutely devastating. my most favorite of vuong's collections yet. the through line was so strong whereas "on earth we're briefly gorgeous" and "time is a mother" descend into a nonlinear jumbled near madness, "night sky with exit wounds" has a cyclic return to the start woven through the full collection. there's a seasick rhythm in this one; a constant swaying back and forth on a never ending tide. just a really incredible collection.
literally? nothing could have prepared me for where this book went. wildly unique. it was like a confluence of chana porter's "the seep" and jack finney's "the body snatchers."
thank you to soft skull press and amanda peters for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
something about this book hollowed me out and rung me dry, like a rotting cabin out behind a berry field. like a season come and gone with no answers. the berry pickers is a gut wrenching story told in retrospect by two narrators, joe and norma, who have both lived different kinds of hard lives. weaving through their story is a constant thread of loss, guilt, and grief. joe can’t let go of his past which is eating him alive and norma’s is rapidly catching up with her after haunting her as a child. some books teach you about the world, about yourself, about your neighbor—but the berry pickers taught me about the power of lies. the petty lies we tell each other, the big lies we tell to protect someone else, and the lies we tell ourselves either to avoid our own realities or to bury what we don’t understand. at so many points in their lives, joe failed the people around him and norma was failed by the people around her—but what the truth brings is acceptance, forgiveness, and a path forward.
something about this book hollowed me out and rung me dry, like a rotting cabin out behind a berry field. like a season come and gone with no answers. the berry pickers is a gut wrenching story told in retrospect by two narrators, joe and norma, who have both lived different kinds of hard lives. weaving through their story is a constant thread of loss, guilt, and grief. joe can’t let go of his past which is eating him alive and norma’s is rapidly catching up with her after haunting her as a child. some books teach you about the world, about yourself, about your neighbor—but the berry pickers taught me about the power of lies. the petty lies we tell each other, the big lies we tell to protect someone else, and the lies we tell ourselves either to avoid our own realities or to bury what we don’t understand. at so many points in their lives, joe failed the people around him and norma was failed by the people around her—but what the truth brings is acceptance, forgiveness, and a path forward.
a rose scented rosary. a dog chained up in the yard. a basin of flour. a stoneware jar with a broken lid. a willowy persimmon tree. a pair of blue plastic sandals. the peità. a retrospective tableau of mother as seen by her children and of wife as seen by her husband all coming to the jarring collision that “mother was a whole person with hopes and dreams before she was mom.”
dnf at 34%. i just can’t do it. i’m sorry elliot but i can’t fathom how i’m supposed to finish this book. between the drawn out memories of childhood bullying and whiplash, blunt, matter of fact mentions of sexual abuse, it’s hard to really feel what elliot is trying to convey beyond a nonlinear timeline of bullet point events. the vignettes are jumbled in such incomprehensible order that it’s not always clear what age elliot is or where in his coming out story we are. nor do any of these scenes flow together in a stream of consciousness fashion, instead reading like post it notes lacking connective tissue or introspection on how they relate to each other or how they have affected elliot. the book continues to tell me what happened but never how it made him feel, how it has changed him as a person, or what he’s done to move on or recover from any of it. beyond that are randomly dropped in, seemingly pointless chunks of canadian history that do not tie into the memory we are being told about in the first place. the history notes, while interesting, serve no purpose other than to allow elliot to be emotionally detached from the writing process for a few paragraphs and subsequently hinder the reader’s ability to follow elliot’s journey in any purposeful way.
this review is 19 years after i’ve read the book so it’s all based on my vague memories of a 10 year old. i LOVED this book as a kid. it was so unique to me then and i was in terror the whole time as his dad has clearly lost the plot. i remember feeling just the undeniable drive to live from the main kid. lots of reviews below consider this book incredibly ableist and it may be. i don’t remember. i was too young to notice. what i do remember is seeing his father as a terrorizing villain and the book focusing on the boy’s will to live. i definitely have to read this one again to see how muddy my memories are…
dnf at 14%. this is supposed to be about a deaf dolphin and her journey through the ocean as she comes to terms with family, fitting in, danger, and acceptance. there’s other pov’s that aren’t the dolphin, aren’t remotely nearby the dolphin, and there’s a literal oceanic rape scene. i just don’t think this book is what it claimed it was gonna be bro.
this was so fucking fun man. an easy, exciting mystery without all the stuffy, self flagellating detective tropes. it was hardly cozy given the subject matter, but more than enough warming by how deeply likable harry is. i tore through this soooo fast. only complaint was i wished the resolution was a bit more drawn out and had some more on-page closure rather than dialogue suggesting future actions.