How Much of These Hills Is Gold
Ratings28
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings28
Average rating4.2
Set during the Gold Rush, in a re-imagined American West, Lucy and Sam, twelve and eleven, are newly orphaned siblings. With their father's body on their backs, they roam an unforgiving landscape dotted with buffalo bones and tiger paw prints, searching for a place to give him a proper burial. The siblings must battle with their own memories, the illusion of the American Dream and each other. HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD is an epic debut novel about family and the search for both a home and a fortune.
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Two young Chinese American-born sisters are all that's left of a complicated family that fell apart amidst the aluring yet harsh gold-rush era of the Wild West. They are guided by the believes and dreams their parents bestowed upon them: old Chinese mysticism, the promise of gold and adventure, the bond of family. These believes often stay at odds with each other, as the girls needs to figure out where and how to claim their home.
The prose is lyric, the characters very memorable yet the narrative is slightly uneven. I wished the story would just be told in a more straight-forward way, as I really enjoyed to hear about Lucy and Sam's adventures. The book somewhat lost steam for me in the middle of the book, where it felt too meandering, and even introduced a new narrator. But it then thankfully returned to Lucy and Sam for a strong finish.
Debating between 3 and 4, as my experience of the book was so uneven across it.
