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Starred review from March 1, 2025
A young man's path to redemption runs through a New England chain restaurant. Hai, the hero of Vuong's ambitious second novel--followingOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)--is a 19-year-old college dropout and painkiller addict prepared to kill himself by leaping off a bridge in East Gladness, a rural Connecticut town. He's coaxed to safety by Grazina, an 82-year-old woman with dementia, and soon he becomes her in-home support; with the help of a cousin, Sony, he lands a job at HomeMarket, a fast-casual joint. This is an unlikely milieu for a novel about the long consequences of violence, but that's what Vuong strives for: In poetic, somber prose, he contemplates Grazina's memories of escaping her native Lithuania under Stalin's purges, the U.S. Civil War (Sony is obsessed with battles and the filmGettysburg), and his own family's escape from Vietnam to America. The book is filled with some brilliant set pieces: A harrowing scene where Hai and his co-workers slaughter pigs for extra cash, his boss's ill-fated attempt to launch a career as a pro wrestler, and moments where Hai soothes Grazina in the midst of her dementia by pretending to be a U.S. Army sergeant helping her escape Stalin's clutches. And throughout, Hai serves as a sponge absorbing America's worst elements: addiction, racism, and the urge to feign hollow successes. (He routinely lies to his mother, who believes he's thriving in med school.) The references toSlaughterhouse-Five andThe Brothers Karamazov underscore Vuong's interest in exploring war and morality, but this is remarkable as a novel that tries to look at those themes outside of conventional realism or combat porn. It's a messy but worthy exploration of how hurt and self-deception leaches into everyday life. A sui generis take on the surprising and cruel ways violence is passed on across generations.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from April 1, 2025
When elderly Grazina, of East Gladness, Connecticut, sees 19-year-old Hai poised to jump from a bridge into the rushing river below, she stops him, invites him in, and offers him a room in her nearly condemned house on the river's bank. She needs a new nurse, after all. When their cash for frozen dinners runs low, Hai gets a job at the chicken chain HomeMarket through Sony, his Civil War-war obsessed cousin who sees their enthusiastic manager, BJ, as the finest general these young soldiers could ask for. Found family is the core of award-winning poet and novelist Vuong's (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, 2019) meaty second novel, especially the loving relationship between Hai, who's caught in the grips of a pill addiction while his mom thinks he's away at medical school, and Grazina, who increasingly needs Hai's help to both stay above water in the present and also excavate the traumas she lived through in WWII-era Lithuania. Love grows, too, among the richly sketched HomeMarket crew, who rally around one another in word and deed. Also exploring themes of war and labor--their wretchedness, their dignity--Vuong's epic-feeling novel is a determined portrait of community, caretaking, and characters who, if they only have each other, have quite a lot.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.