Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In by Phuc TranMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book took me much longer to read than it should. I kept putting it aside. Was it the book or me? I tend to think it was the book. While it was written well, there didn’t seem to be a strong thread pulling the story forward that made me want to keep going. Once a chapter finished, it could have been the end of the story, for each chapter.
The frame of the chapters was a great choice, starts out with a classic literature book, then relates how that fit into his life at that time. For example: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is compared to his teenage transformation, he cannot control and his body does something different and his family treats him differently, much like Gregor Samsa when he turned into a bug with his family reaction.
I particularly enjoyed one of the later chapters “The Autobiography of Malcom X” and Tran’s look at racism. For me that was his most powerful chapter. I wanted to call it essay, since that is what this felt like, a group of essays, that also happen to follow Tran as he ages, starting young when the family left Vietnam to when he graduates high school. Oddly enough, I wanted more post-high school, how was college for him, how did he change?
The book is very readable and relatable.
Overall rating 3.5 stars, and rounded up.
Thanks to Flatiron Books/Macmillan and NetGalley for an uncorrected electronic advance review copy of this book.
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