The Mountains Sing is a sprawling, winding, deeply layered family history that lives and

breathes wholly through its setting--Vietnam during the 20th century--and the effect it has on the
novel's characters. This is a story of unfathomable horror matched step for step by human
determination, selflessness, and the indivisible, magic bonds of family. A teenaged Huong faces
the aftershock of the Vietnam War and longs for her family to be in one place once again; as she
navigates this nightmare, her grandmother tells the story of her own journey years prior,
displaced by the emerging communist regime in North Vietnam and again by the Land Reforms,
forcing a harrowing journey to Ha Noi with her six young children. The Mountains Sing
beautifully follows the evolution of these bonds through time in a way that rivals family epics
like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Middlesex, revealing an intricate tree of life where dead
leaves and new blooms live in perfect symbiosis. Here, the beauties and evils of the outside
world are ground into a fertilizer of experience that nurtures the good life of things to come.
There is a brilliant thread of hope at the heart of this novel, and it weaves its way through each
one of Nguyen Phan Que Mai's sentences, coloring each moment with incredible emotional
depth and understanding.

Shorter options:

The Mountains Sing is a sprawling, winding, deeply layered family history that lives and
breathes wholly through its setting--Vietnam during the 20th century--and the effect it has on the
novel's characters. This is a story of unfathomable horror matched step for step by human
determination, selflessness, and the indivisible, magic bonds of family. The Mountains Sing
beautifully follows the evolution of these bonds through time in a way that rivals family epics
like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Middlesex, revealing an intricate tree of life where dead
leaves and new blooms live in perfect symbiosis. Here, the beauties and evils of the outside
world are ground into a fertilizer of experience that nurtures the good life of things to come.
There is a brilliant thread of hope at the heart of this novel, and it weaves its way through each
one of Nguyen Phan Que Mai's sentences, coloring each moment with incredible emotional
depth and understanding.

____________

The Mountains Sing is a sprawling, winding, deeply layered family history that lives and
breathes wholly through its setting--Vietnam during the 20th century--and the effect it has on the
novel's characters. This is a story of unfathomable horror matched step for step by human
determination, selflessness, and the indivisible, magic bonds of family. Here, the beauties and
evils of the outside world are ground into a fertilizer of experience that nurtures the good life of
things to come. There is a brilliant thread of hope at the heart of this novel, and it weaves its way
through each one of Nguyen Phan Que Mai's sentences, coloring each moment with incredible
emotional depth and understanding.