What readers think of The Emperor of Gladness, plus links to write your own review.

This is a profound book, albeit highly disturbing, about the love and conflict, addictions and deceptions that bind together families who are struggling to survive on very little money, very little education, and very few community resources. These are people who are truly on the forgotten fringes of society.

Written by American Book Award winner Ocean Vuong, this is the story of Hai (pronounced "Hi"), a 19-year-old Vietnamese-American living in the dying, post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut. It's September 2009. Hai is lost. He has lost his sense of self and rightness. His short life has been built on lies and drugs. And now he has seemingly come to the end after telling his beloved mother a whopper of a lie that is so big, so glorious that she has found real happiness for the first time in a long time. But what he told her isn't true. So Hai does the only thing he can think to do: Kill himself.

Just as he is about to jump off a railroad bridge into a swirling, powerful river, an 82-year-old woman living in deep poverty and neglect in the shadow of that bridge, screams at him to stop. Miraculously, he hears her and obeys her. And then she takes him in…for good. Her name is Grazina Vitkus, a widow of Lithuanian descent and the mother of two adult children from whom she is quite distant. She is suffering from advanced dementia. Because her house is so dilapidated and in such a run-down and chemically toxic area, no live-in nurse will stay long. Hai takes on that role. But money is scarce, so he gets a job at a fast-food restaurant called HomeMarket, thanks to his autistic cousin Sony who also works there. It is here in a restaurant that serves Thanksgiving dinner foods year round that Hai is fully embraced into a caring community for the first time. It is also here that he finds order, consistency, and discipline for the first time. But the big lie he told his mother and his continued dependence on drugs taints his new life with desperation and despondency as he desperately searches for a second chance.

This is a provocative and haunting work of literary fiction that is not only unsettling, but also emotionally searing. It is a dark and difficult book to read because the characters' lives are so devastating. Even though there is a small sense of redemption and hope, the ending is just as sad and shattering as the rest of the book. Still, it's an important novel with a profound and relevant message.

Stories of the millions of Americans who must struggle to subsist on minimum wage jobs are rarely told, and I am grateful to Ocean Vuong to sharing this story about his found family at working at a Boston Market-style restaurant, after having been saved from ending his life and jumping off a bridge by an elderly Lithuanian immigrant woman. Grazina, struggling with dementia, lives in an abandoned neighborhood on the edge of a toxic river in small town Connecticut, invites Hai, the main character, to live in her ramshackle house, and the two develop a close bond, in part because of their experiences with war in their own countries. The story must also be Vuong's story, who dedicates the book to the memory of an actual Grazina, and we learn that Hai, means Ocean in Vietnamese.

Vuong has said one of his challenges the novel writing was that these Americans living on the fringes really have no "arc" to their stories -- they are stuck, trying to figure out just how to survive every day. I appreciate how involved I was with Hai and each of the characters, and especially the focus on how people try to be kind to each other, despite all the stresses and pressures.

I give the book four stars only because the actual writing is often challenging to read. One puzzling aspect is that much of the story is told in third person, from Hai's perspective, but whenever the story shifts to the fast food joint, the voice shifts to third person omniscient. I was frustrated for a while, because I was missing Hai's perspective, how he felt about what was going on, but then I guessed perhaps Vuong is recreating the experience of being in a fast-food environment where your "family" kind of exists as one organism and your individuality does not come into play as strongly? And I know that Vuong is a poet, but this is one of those books I feel could have used a sterner editor -- the transitions are often choppy and confusing, time and place shifts in the middle of a sentence and some of the metaphors are ridiculous to the point of not meaning anything! But -- I'm still very glad I read it and am grateful for the stories shared.