I love the idea of books written entirely in a letter format. I love how it allows the narrator/letter-writer so much space to be intimately personal & vulnerable with a sense of harmless abandon. I love stories that stir diverse themes into one holistic piece, though still remaining a mere sum of its subplots, but also something way larger than just that, in the same breath.

This book ticked all these check boxes & several others, shelving itself in my favourites FOREVER. Something tells me to not reveal the story word by word, so I'm going to type whatever springs in my mind. You're welcome. Little Dog, the only name we come to know him by, writes to his illiterate mother, talking about his life as a gay Vietnamese immigrant in America, in a language she'll never be able to comprehend.

He pours out his struggles as a teen still coming to terms with his sexuality, and his identity in a completely different country that he must now consider home. The pervasive "you" in the story, his Ma, somewhat holds it together, as Little D unearths his deepest secrets in a light a son would want his mother to see them through. But that doesn't keep him from being explicit in his descriptions, explaining his attempts at sex and casual drug use with relentless ease, perhaps encouraged by the impossibility of his mother ever accessing the text he's writing.

I found myself hurting at his relationship with Trevor & the dismal ending it had to meet, and for that matter, even what he shared with his grandma Lan. Ocean here blends poetry & prose with such seamless and tangible poignancy, he evokes emotions in the reader deep enough to cause involuntarily bodily reactions - the twitch of an eye, an unanticipated half-sigh. His potrayal of a crumbling family's history rooted in a country at war felt palpable on my skin. And the scene where he comes out to his Ma at a cafe was exceptionally difficult to read.

I recommend this book URGENTLY.

My heart got tugged at the most in the book's third section, penned wholly like a poem, where Ocean says “Tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.”

Just go and read it. It's worth it, really. If anyone who have read it already, can put their thoughts in the comments.