This is the story of Little Dog, a young man telling the story of his life, through letters, to his mother who can’t read. In these letters he can be his true authentic self because he knows she will never be able to understand it. This becomes the metaphor of his life as he is caught in the middle of wanting to be seen by his mother, but her not understanding who he is as a person. This explored his history in Vietnam before he was even born, and stories even his own mother didn’t know, to digging up truths about himself. This was a good heartfelt novel that took a look at the love between a mother and son, while exploring the unsparing truths of race, class and masculinity. It was good, but this reader wasn’t in love with this story, but they could see why other people would be. The writing in this was superb and eloquent; it did such a good job of creating this atmosphere between the characters. Vuong used this beautiful writing to create these very complex and real characters, but what lacked was a sense of story. The reader felt like this was just a tad bit directionless, as literary fiction can tend to be. The reader wanted more story and more of a clear path for the characters; it just felt like things were happening to them out of thin air and not in any sequential order. That’s not to say this is a bad book, if you’re a reader who enjoys more character driven stories, this will be for you, as this is devoid of a true plot. But aside from that, looking at the characters, this felt like a brilliant read. The relationships in this felt very poignant, raw and real; the care that the author had with them made them feel extremely fleshed out. There were so many depths to the characters and the relationships our main character, Little Dog, had throughout the novel were so intimate and spoke to the nuisances of real relationships; nothing is as black and white as it seems. This novel was really good in this way, but it didn’t completely speak to this reader; it was deep, but with a focus of being exceedingly deep that sometimes made us lose our focus and the point of the novel at times. In the end, this reader really enjoyed their time reading it because it was meaningful and impactful, not so much for this reader, but they could see it being so for others. It was such a poetic look at the life and death, and gave words to things we often times forget to think about.