The Trưng sisters, Trắc and Nhi, are as different than each other than sisters can be, but they are united in one thing – their outrage at the treatment of the Viet by the colonizing Han Chinese. When their outrages grow too heavy to bear, they raise an army of women to fight back.
It occurred to me while I was reading this book that not only do I know very little about Vietnam past the eponymous war (and even that mostly through the eyes of the American forces), I don’t think I’ve ever read a book set there, fiction or non-fiction.
Nguyen writes in a sweeping, slightly detached way that I saw some readers struggled with, but I really liked it – it reminded me of how epics are narrated, and gave the whole book the feeling that we were listening to a story that had been honed and polished by generations of oral storytelling. The sisters and their companions are sometimes distant and larger than life, but that’s the point! The Vietnam depicted is a place of legendary heroism and legendary misdeeds, and despite knowing nothing about it I was quickly drawn in.
However, I did think the ending felt rushed, maybe because of a restricted page count. After a long and well-detailed lead up to the great battles, the way down from the peak skids past so fast that we only get a few glimpses of how things fell apart. I would have liked to seen this explored in more depth for a more balanced story. Even the battles ran a bit together, especially the portions narrated by characters who were introduced at just about the same time.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.