There's something otherworldly beautiful about Ocean Vuong's writing style. From the beginning I realized that this book, for the most part is not for me. It's about coming to terms with intergenerational trauma, with masculinity and sexuality, with living in a society that has deemed you as not part of it the way others are, and many other things, all while finding beauty in the terror of it all. It's a book for the narrator's mother, but it's mostly a book for Little Dog, the voice that sweeps us away.

This book seems to be a hit or miss, and for the most part, this is understandable. The writing style is what you imagine poetry stretched to paragraphs and chapters to read like - fluid, eloquent, at times confusing, and always in danger of trying too hard. Had I not found small glimpses that I could relate to, that stopped me in the middle of the page, urging me to write down page upon page of my own thoughts, I probably would have skimmed through this book, naming it pretentious, lackluster, vain. But within these words, which sometimes don't make sense the way they are presented, there is a spark and a heart and a voice trying to find out what it wants to say.

It's hard to make, dirt, grime, violence and death beautiful; Vuong manages to do just that.