Reading log
Chapter 1 + 2 17 Feb 2026
I found myself immensely confused at the start when I first started reading this, because this novel is entirely unlike any I’ve read before. There isn’t any story mountain to follow here — it’s simply a man writing to his mother in English, a language she cannot comprehend. There’s something beautiful about that dissonance, and the writer — Little Dog, named affectionally — understands that dissonance.
But as I continue reading, I found that the haphazard descriptions of scattered memories eventually aligned to spell out a common message: whether it’s about how war influenced the behaviour of Little Dog’s mother and grandmother (Lan), or about how weirdly twisted it was that physical abuse was their way of conveying emotional distress and was an act of love.
The symbolism of the monarchs and their migration in the first chapter was quite interesting. I can’t place my finger on what exactly about Little Dog’s life they seem to parallel right now in writing, but if you read it in context with the memories Little Dog shares in his letter, it somehow clicks. That’s the beauty of Ocean Vuong’s writing, I guess.