Mother's Beloved: Stories from Laos

Rating:
Summary: Stories from Laos
Review: This book contains fourteen short stories and had just average entertainment. If you want to learn about the Lao culture it will help you understand and it is a good book for that purpose. Unfortunately, the stories were not very exciting. Each one had a nice moral or a lesson to learn and put a smile on my face. But, if you are a busy person it might not be worth your time to read this book. It was not a bad collection; I just expected more.

Rating:
Summary: Mother's Beloved
Review: This book of 14 short stories by the late Outhine Bounyavong, a noted Lao author, is the first book of contemporary Lao short stories available in English. These deceptively simple stories tell of ordinary Lao people, their customs, traditions, and values, and show the impact of political, economic, and social changes since independence. Despite occasional infelicities in translation, this book will be valuable to those interested in Laos or in Southeast Asian literature. This bi-lingual English-Lao edition should be of particular interest to Lao emigrants and their children. The older adults will be happy with the Lao version, and their children can capture a sense of their parents' former lives through the English translation. Peter Koret provedes a useful introduction to Lao literature and Outhine's place in it.