This is not a book you can like or enjoy. It's a book to make you think and feel and to force beautiful language in your face while telling a really powerful and traumatic tale. To my shame I know very little about the Vietnam War in particular, but I felt Vietnam viscerally in this book. It made me feel sick and a bit in awe at the same time. There's a bit in this book about a monkey that made me question whether I could continue to read the book, it made me both sad and actually nauseous at the same time. The sex scenes are raw and incredibly well written. This book will stay with me for a long time and not entirely in a good way.

I found the prose in this book, the tone, and the flow, really difficult. I felt like it was done this way, a little bit, to be impressive and not because that's what the story needed. Having said that it was stunning but just really hard work as a reader. All the way through this book I questioned what I was going to say about it. And I'm still not sure...