On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Review — One of the Most Beautiful Books I've Ever Read

Rating: ★★★★★

Briefly Gorgeous Book Review:

Okay, this book. Ocean Vuong writes a letter to his mother, a mother who can't read English, and through that letter he unpacks everything. Immigration. War. Addiction. What it means to be queer in a family that doesn't have the language for it.

Vuong is a poet first and you feel that on every page. Every single sentence feels intentional, like he carved each word out of something precious. This isn't someone writing prose who happens to be good with language. This is a poet who decided a novel was the only container big enough for what he needed to say.

The story follows Little Dog, a Vietnamese American kid growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, raised by a mother who works in a nail salon and a grandmother who still carries the war inside her. There's a section about the grandmother, about inherited trauma, about the way violence travels through generations without anyone choosing to pass it on, that genuinely made me set the book down and just sit there. Vuong writes about the body a lot. About hands. About skin. About how the people who raise us leave marks we can't always see.

And then there's the love story. Little Dog falls for a boy named Trevor, and it's tender and reckless and doomed in the way that first loves sometimes are, especially when the world hasn't made space for you yet. Vuong doesn't romanticize addiction or poverty, but he refuses to reduce anyone to their worst moments either. That's a hard line to walk and he never stumbles.

It's not a fast read, and it's not supposed to be. You sit with this one. You let it work on you. By the end, I felt like I understood something about love and loss that I didn't have words for before. Five stars. One of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

If You Liked Briefly Gorgeous, Try:

• Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski — A lyrical, letter-form novel about a young queer man in 1980s Poland writing to a former lover. Same poetic intensity, same ache.
  

• Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart — A boy growing up queer in 1980s Glasgow while caring for his addicted mother. Same devastating tenderness between child and struggling parent.
  

• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy — Dense, image-rich prose exploring family trauma and forbidden love. If you loved Vuong's sentences, Roy's will hit the same way.

From Luke Stoffel's Shelf

If this book review resonated with you, check out The Warboy Chronicles — a deeply personal story about identity, survival, and the long road to becoming who you were always meant to be. thewarboychronicles.com