I didn't enjoy this book, but it was haunting. Lucy and Sam are orphaned sisters. They struggle to make their way in mid-19th century California. Sam does this by passing as a boy. Another reviewer characterized this book as Faulknerian and I think that is a good description. It is painful to listen to or read. ( )

Oct 2020: DNF. I can't with the literary misery, especially right now.

Dec 2023: Also, this will forever remain in my memory as The One Where The Children Carry Their Father's Decomposing Body Around In A Chest And Pieces Start Falling Off Of It And The Daughter Sees Her Father's Penis Fall Off And Kicks Dirt Over It And Revels In Her Power Over Him. Like, I get that it's supposed to be symbolic and surreal, but it's actually an unintentional parody of the entire genre.

A solid debut that really captured the dry loveliness of the western landscape in a time when the land didn't love you back. Lucy and Sam scramble to survive after their Ba dies. About halfway through we see a couple years prior when they're younger and Ma is still around, and then from beyond the grave Ba tells his tale as a youth carrying his own secrets.

Not a cheerful ending, but contemplative. ( )

C Pam Zhang's debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, is a beautiful, roaming, aching novel about the promise of the American dream and what it means to find a home. Set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home.

These siblings, Lucy and Sam, 12 and 11, children of Chinese laborers, take their father's body on a journey through the California hills in the middle of the Gold Rush. The quest for burial, the family strife, the smell of death, the hot sun, the dust, the storms, all recall Faulkner. Ba (Mandarin for "dad") haunts the narrative as Addie Bundren did, first as voice and then ultimately as a corpse, awful, unwieldy, and decomposing.

“How Much of These Hills Is Gold” is an aching book, full of myths of Zhang’s making (including tigers that roam the Western hills) as well as joys, as well as sorrows. It’s violent and surprising and musical. It's a book that doesn't provide easy answers. And it's one that quietly confrontational. Zhang wants you to remember the forgotten Chinese laborers, the very laborers who helped build the transcontinental railroad. More importantly, Zhang wants you to realize that they belong to this land too, even if they quite don't feel that way and even if their own individual ideas of what constitutes a home, a body, etc. may differ.

Zhang characters are flawed. Ba, is one mean-spirited but well meaning individual. And Lucy, tragically in the end, might be looking for a home in all the wrong places. Zhang does interesting things with genre too - subverting the Western to talk about race, gender, sexual identity, poverty and pubescence.

Alongside Sam and Lucy’s family story are the stories of the genocide and persecution of Native Americans, the colonization of the west and the compulsive exploitation of the land by desperate settlers and greedy opportunists. This is not your American history course from high school. This is poetic truth.

How Much of These Hills is Gold, is a beautiful and daring debut novel from a promising novelist. The novel doesn't necessarily have a neat ending. It's up to you to decide if Lucy and Sam ever truly find a home to call their own. ( )

This book was remarkable that even while reading it I was catching myself saying the whole story could be transplanted infinite times from the western gold rush setting to so many others and still be a beautiful telling of the richest stories of life. ( )