Rating: 
Summary: Monkey bridge
Review: Monkey Bridge is a wonderful example of an author putting her true emotions into a touching and well-written story. Lan Cao starts off by introducing the character Mai Nguyen who portrays all the feelings that the author is feeling throughout the narration. Mai recalls throughout the story, the many events in her life that has made an impact on her and others surrounding her, such as what her grandfather was like and the "incident" that broke him up from the family. Mai brings her feelings and emotions into the story with vivid descriptions like her observations in the hospital-using words such as "smell of blood, wet, warm, and how it rose into the soleman air. The writing techniques Lan Cao uses include a wide range of figurative language, diction, alliteration, anecdotes, and also techniques to give the reader a sense of realism. The stories told through Lan Cao's character, Mai, depicts the life of a vietnamese, how life would be during the war, and addapting to a new environment/culture. Through Mai's descriptions and stories of her grandfather you feel for her loss of a loved one and the greif of basically being forced to change their way of living. Cao uses a very unique technique of linking key words or senses together such as the color red. I noticed that she kept a constant going thourghout the story of red object, whether being of good nature or bad. The "red" blood, the color of red for war the traditions of wedding dresses and lucky red paper. Cao uses sensery descriptions such as these to, as I see it, bring the reader into the story and understand the feeling behind it a little bit more. Overall the book is a very well-written narrative that not only overpours with vivid descriptions and feelins of sensitivity but also points out very meaningful morals or lessons such as that violence does not come from only war but from other forms of society (domestic sides of our society today). Cao is definitly a talented and gifted writer, this showing through a must-read novel that you surely will not beable to put down and will want to read over and over again.
Rating:
Summary: A memoir trying to be a novel or vice versa
Review: The author is proficient in the use of adjectives but she not infrequently bombards us with too many unnecessary adjectives which tend to muddle rather than clarify the object of her description. The book is about a daughter who lives with her mother in an apartment in Virginia. The father had died suddenly before the fall of Saigon, and Mai was taken to America in the care of an American colonel friend in February 1975. Mother and daughter were reunited in 1975. The novel's opening scene is a hospital, where the mother has been hospitalized for a stroke. The novel ends with the mother's suicide (because of depression?) and Mai preparing to start college in Connecticut after having learned from found diary entries that her mother is actually the daughter of a rich landowner, not her grandmother's husband. This novel was obviously written for the Western audience or as a cultural self-reminder, as evidenced by the unnecessary explications of aspects of Vietnamese culture and history: Tet, hai ba Trung, the war, etc. It is this obvious cathartic need to explain every minute aspect of the refugee experience that makes this supposedly fictional novel more like a diary, and that makes the book unengrossing. If only the writer could decisively choose between either the memoir or fictional genre.
Rating: 
Summary: touching
Review: The book is a most touching account of life in America for refugees from a war many in this country despised. The story is about immigration and Americanization, war and peace, trauma and healing. It is written in beautiful, poetic prose, depicts the complicated relationship between mother and daughter, and provides a blockbuster, dramatic ending. Highly recommended for all interested in good writing and good storytelling. Read the book over and over and you will continue to find many gems.
Rating: 
Summary: A TOUCHING, INSIGHTFUL STORY ABOUT A MOTHER-DAUGHTER IN A RI
Review: THE FIRST NOVEL BY A VIETNAMESE AMERICAN ABOUT THE WAR EXPERIENCE AND ABOUT ADAPTING TO THE NEW AMERICAN REALITIE
Rating: 
Summary: A gifted writer portrays Viet Nam like no other
Review: The novel is beautiful and deeply sensitive. Two stories of a mother and daughter Vietnamese immigrants are revealed in a somewht challenging read. It took a while to feel the cadence of her methodology, but the book on the whole was worth the moderate effort it may be to truly appreciate her work.What I found lovely is to hear about the real lives that the Vietnamese had before, during and after the war. Lan Cao offers to the reader a real sense of being in her country and living the lives of the poor and the rich. While the plot developes, she very creatively allows the reader to really get a taste of the food, the lifestyle, their celebrations and their rituals of their faith. The daughter tells her story as a youngster sent away from Viet Nam prior to the capitol city of their residence falling to the enemy. The pain she must have felt leaving her mother and her (supposed) beloved relatives was wretching. Her mother barely gets out of the country, but, her father, the daughter's beloved grandfather is somehow lost in the chaos and left behind. For this, the granddaughter agonizes and searches ways to locate him. Her mother on the other hand, seems to be having more difficulty coping with being in the new country, and as the granddaughter presses her for more follow up on grandfather, it somehow escaltes the mother's anxiety. Her depression and questionable sanity are at risk, but while at risk, she endeavors to journal all the truths and lies of her incredible life and the lives of her family and landowners. The ending is unexpected and shocking. This is definitely a novel with such beautiful, original and rich construction that one could reread it and be sure to find new insights. Don't lend this one out, you will want to read it again and will not want to lose it.
Rating:
Summary: A gifted writer portrays Viet Nam like no other
Review: The novel is beautiful and deeply sensitive. Two stories of a mother and daughter Vietnamese immigrants are revealed in a somewht challenging read. It took a while to feel the cadence of her methodology, but the book on the whole was worth the moderate effort it may be to truly appreciate her work. What I found lovely is to hear about the real lives that the Vietnamese had before, during and after the war. Lan Cao offers to the reader a real sense of being in her country and living the lives of the poor and the rich. While the plot developes, she very creatively allows the reader to really get a taste of the food, the lifestyle, their celebrations and their rituals of their faith. The daughter tells her story as a youngster sent away from Viet Nam prior to the capitol city of their residence falling to the enemy. The pain she must have felt leaving her mother and her (supposed) beloved relatives was wretching. Her mother barely gets out of the country, but, her father, the daughter's beloved grandfather is somehow lost in the chaos and left behind. For this, the granddaughter agonizes and searches ways to locate him. Her mother on the other hand, seems to be having more difficulty coping with being in the new country, and as the granddaughter presses her for more follow up on grandfather, it somehow escaltes the mother's anxiety. Her depression and questionable sanity are at risk, but while at risk, she endeavors to journal all the truths and lies of her incredible life and the lives of her family and landowners. The ending is unexpected and shocking. This is definitely a novel with such beautiful, original and rich construction that one could reread it and be sure to find new insights. Don't lend this one out, you will want to read it again and will not want to lose it.
Rating:
Summary: A remarkable storytelling.
Review: The story is so fascinating it has caught my attention many nights in a row. It is packed with so many social and historical facts I have to digest each data before moving to another chapter (the reader, however, could skip these sections if he/she did not want to delve into these details). Besides the usual digressions about Tet (Vietnamese New Year) and the Tet offensive, the Trung sisters (see book under the same name), the Mongol invasion, the story of the betel nut, and so on, the book could be broadly subdivided into two sections dealing with daughter and mother's recollections about the war. This is one of the rare books that approach the Vietnam War from the natives' point of view. The year was 1975, when both daughter and mother landed in America shortly before the fall of Saigon. We were given a glimpse about their new life in a foreign land, their adjustment to new customs, ways of thinking, and schooling system. We learned about the story of a U.S. colonel who almost had been killed in Vietnam a few years earlier and who now sponsored the two refugees to the U.S. The most interesting section, however, was the one related by the mother: she opened our eyes to colonial Vietnam, the system of provincial landlords and peasants, and the Viet Cong. Behind the façade of a plain housewife, the mother slowly unveiled the dark family secrets she had been trying to hide from her daughter all her life. This is a story with a twist that made the reading exciting and worthwhile. How the author has been able to weave together the stories of a U.S. colonel, the Viet Cong, the landlords and peasants, and the refugees together in a short book is simply remarkable. This is the Vietnam War many Americans did not know about until now.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs some serious editing...
Review: This book needs a lot of editing, since in it's present form it wanders aimlessly and without purpose for pages and pages before anything of substance occurs. The book and its attempt to explore the spirit world seems like a spirit: hard to grasp and unsatisfying. For better literature on Vietnam, try Le Le Hayslip's "When Heave and Earth Changed Places," which has its feet on the ground (despite the title) and a much greater emotional impact.
Rating:
Summary: Needs some serious editing...
Review: This book needs a lot of editing, since in it's present form it wanders aimlessly and without purpose for pages and pages before anything of substance occurs. The book and its attempt to explore the spirit world seems like a spirit: hard to grasp and unsatisfying. For better literature on Vietnam, try Le Le Hayslip's "When Heave and Earth Changed Places," which has its feet on the ground (despite the title) and a much greater emotional impact.
Rating:
Summary: Truely Well written Immigrant Story
Review: This book, although, or maybe because it is quite short, captivates one, and describes very well the feelings of an immigrant as she arrives in the US and begins to integrate. This aspect of the story is universal; applicable to European immigrants as myself, or Asians, or any other Ethnic group. In addition, the aspects of the Vietnam war, how it affected, and still affects, the Vietnamese population, are described in such a personal, immediate manner, that one feels one is there. I've given this book as a present to both my father and my brother, and both were quite taken by it. It is NOT an easy, happy, book, but one that is quite rewarding.
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