I was excited to read this as I’ll be visiting Vietnam in a couple of months, but sadly, this book was a huge disappointment. It lacked depth, the pacing wasn’t great, the characters were flat, and it felt incredibly shallow while attempting to provide political commentary.

Characters It felt as though all the atrocities that could happen to someone during a war had been put into a bullet-point list on a piece of paper and assigned to the grandma’s children one by one. I felt like we couldn’t really get into their headspace, understand their grief and sorrow because there simply wasn’t enough time to explore them. The grandma had six children, and some of those children had partners who also suffered through the war, colonialism, and the communist regime; and the book tried to touch upon every single one of them and their struggles. In my opinion, this book could have fared better if it had tried to tackle fewer of these major tragedies instead of attempting to cover all of them. As a result, all of the side characters, as well as the two main characters — the grandma and the granddaughter — felt very one-dimensional.

Political Commentary This book was blatantly anti-communist without actually presenting a meaningful argument. "But I give my workers good wages. But I’m fair. But I gave food to the poor when there was a famine." That is not a good enough argument to prove the virtues of the free market and capitalism. The grandma working in the black market was also portrayed as something inherently good and admirable, while everyone who considered it wrong was simply described as being brainwashed by "the propaganda". What are you talking about????? It felt so incredibly shallow. Portraying communist Vietnamese people as essentially evil, without giving them any redeeming qualities, while simultaneously showing such great empathy toward American soldiers who were bombing and killing people and literally poisoning the land for generations is crazy work. And I am not saying that what the author trying to convey — that the war is a lose lose equation and the enemy is also human being — was bad a bad argument. I am saying that the contrast between this and that is greatly unbalanced.

Vietnamese History One of the reasons I wanted to read this book was to learn more about Vietnamese history, and I can safely say that it achieved that goal. However, I wanted to learn about Vietnamese history through Vietnamese eyes, from a book written for a Vietnamese audience (or at least from a perspective that wasn’t so blatantly aimed at a Western audience), and I don’t think this book was suitable for that goal.