If You Lived Here

Whenever I think about this novel, I think about how after I read it, I gave it to my mom, thinking she would also enjoy it. I was right. Days later my mom called to say, "What a lovely book." While this may not be standard literary criticism vocabulary, it is the one word for me that defines Dana Sachs's writing: lovely. She writes with such quiet authority, in this case about a couple adopting a child from Vietnam. Sachs knows Vietnam well -- she has lived there more than once, written a book

At first, I found this book difficult to get into. The writing style seemed wordy and it took awhile to get used to the plot being written in present tense. Three chapters in I found myself sucked into Shelley and Xuan Mai's stories.Shelley is the wife of a mortician. They have been trying to adopt a child from another country. Xuan Mai is a Vietnamese immigrant who left Vietnam at the end of the 1970s. She fled the country for personal reasons and lives an isolated life.Though Shelley story is

There were some things I really liked about this book and then every once in a while, something about the writing wouldn't ring true. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what bothered me. I really liked Mai's story and cared quite a bit more about her and the resolution of her story than Shelley's. Something about Shelley was just unlikeable to me, as a reader. Still, this book was fairly well-written and it was an interesting perspective on Vietnam and the aftermath of the war.