mahaofhyrule's reviews
89 reviews

What a fantastic conclusion to a wonderful series. I'm gonna miss this colorful cast of characters I've grown to love so much.

This is normally where I would word vomit out a review about what I liked and disliked about the book, but I'm so overcome with emotion. I cried sometimes, cheered during other times, and experienced the five stages of grief throughout my time with this book (and this series as a whole, tbh). And I think that's as good of a review as I can churn out.

Shoutout to Holland because I didn't expect to care about him so much. Literally crying my eyes out. And Kell, Rhy, Alucard...I love ya'll. Lila too, she grew on me in this book.

DNF at about 70%. Yeah I probably could have forced myself to finish it, but I'd rather not. I'm not even sure what to rate this so I guess for now it's TBD?

I feel bad, I was really enjoying this in the beginning, but then towards the middle of the book as well as after the climax of of the chandelier falling and Christine being kidnapped mid-performance, the focus shifted to side characters I don't really care about. I feel like this story is heavily carried by its atmosphere, and sometimes it's hard to showcase that in books. Might have to check out the movie or musical?

I really wish I could give this more stars, because at its core I think the message of this story is heartbreaking in the most beautiful way. However, as a story, I wasn't the most engaged reader.

The narrative is told through the POV of Little Dog, who is a Vietnamese immigrant boy writing a letter to his illiterate mother, who is suffering from trauma from the Vietnam War. On this premise alone, I was intrigued to get right into this story.

Let me start off by saying that Ocean Vuong is a great writer. His prose is definitely one of the stronger aspects of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous which of course is a given since he is a poet after all! There were a number of quotes I marked with sticky notes while I was reading because I had a feeling they would stick me for a long time, and I truly felt like I was present in some scenes described throughout the novel.

I was pretty hooked during the beginning, however, I started to feel more disengaged towards the middle of the book. I personally don't really read poetry that much (rarely, in fact), so I think I just felt disconnected from the writing style and it made me realize I'm probably not Vuong's target audience. I could not engage with the flowery language and I felt like because I'm not a poetry reader that a lot of the "beauty" of this work went completely over my head.

This story is supposed to be a letter, and Little Dog recaps various events at different stages of his life, and here's where I experience another issue: the events are completely scattered. What I mean by that is that one moment, he's describing a time when he was a child following another boy on the playground, and then after, he's describing another moment where he's with his dying grandmother (it wasn't these two specific moments, but hopefully you get the point). Anyway, because of how these events were framed, it not only confused me often and took me out of the story, but also ruined some tension of otherwise very emotional moments.

I'm not sure what else to say here. I feel like this caters to a very specific reader and unfortunately that reader is not me.

I enjoyed the first book more. Lila's POV chapters were pretty annoying to read because everything she did just showed how she basically learned nothing from the first book. Besides that though I enjoyed it the story, and I'm looking forward to reading the last book!

At first I thought Lizzy would be someone I could sympathize with, but then she basically turned out to be a cheater on her nice BF. (Who by the way, is not a bad person, a little unaware of the world around him, but he loved her). I'm not sure if Will develops, but I wasn't too big a fan of him either.

The plot also kind of stagnated towards the middle which got me a little bored. I've read lighthearted stories that still kept my attention, and unfortunately this one didn't do it for me :(