Book Review: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. By Ocean Vuong. New York:  Penguin, 2019,  256 pp., $18.00 paperback.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong is the debut novel from an award-winning Vietnamese American poet, written as a letter to his mother, which explores themes of race, class, addiction, power, violence, and intergenerational trauma with a palpable rawness. Vuong describes the book as a “phantom novel” as it is dedicated to the “phantom readership of the mother, of my family” (Spiegel, 2017/2022), who have low literacy and are unable to read the book. This phantom dedication highlights the painful division between parents and children within immigrant families, both divided concretely by language barriers but also by cultural perspectives. Even as he seeks to share the deepest parts of his life with his mother, giving life to what was once unspeakable, memorializing words to paper, yet knowing she will never read them. Perhaps it is this knowing that provides the necessary distance, shielding him from maternal rejection, that allows Vuong to bear the risk of vulnerability.

While this book illustrates a multitude of themes related to the profound loss and reorganization of refugee families, each exquisitely impactful in its own right, this review will focus specifically on one salient aspect: the experience of child immigrants and refugees, as depicted in the author's narrative. Child immigrants are thought to be more receptive and adaptable to their new country than adolescents (Ying et al., 2001). However, their reliance on caretakers who may be psychologically overwhelmed makes them more susceptible to upheaval (Akhtar, 1995). Bonovitz (2004) outlines pertinent factors affecting immigrant children based on their developmental age at the time of migration, with

the most crucial factor being the parents' ability to “provide an adequate holding environment” (p. 129) that shields the child from excessive loss or disruptio