How Much of These Hills is Gold is beautifully evocative and atmospheric, and I wish I loved it as much as I wanted to. Everything about the story feels fresh and new and game-changing, but at the same time I struggled to get into it and through it for the duration of the novel. The story wasn't pacey enough to pull me along with it, and while I love literary fiction and how lyrical and challenging it can be, at times this novel felt too inaccessible and like I had to work to attain meaning, or connection.

This is an astonishingly stunning, timeless and original piece of epic historical adventure fiction from the truly talented C. Pam Zhang that heartbreaking resonates in our contemporary world today. She fuses myths and fiction that comprise history and those that write it with the cultural folklore and myths that immigrants and their families bring with them in their conflicts, struggle and search for identity, a sense of belonging and home, amidst their efforts to survive in the face of abuse, exploitation and relentless hostility to their presence. Set in the dying days of the Californian gold rush, the non-linear narrative is structured into four parts, stitching together the past, present and future of the Chinese-American siblings, 12 year old Lucy and 11 year old Sam.

Having already suffered the loss of their mother, Lucy and Sam lose their father, Ba, a coal miner turned gold prospector, becoming orphans in a threatening environment. They leave with the body of their father, seeking the right place to bury him. The siblings are very different, Lucy seeks stability, security, a home, community, anonymity, wanting to learn, to be more than she is. These are never going to options that are open to her, it is constantly made clear her that they will never belong. Strange hypocrisy and ironic that these judgements and thinking comes from those who are themselves recent immigrants with a history of having stolen from and murdered indigenous communities. Lucy becomes aware of the power of writing, of documents and deeds, enabling the practice of legally stealing with impunity, of the legitimacy conferred by writing history, even if so much of it is untrue. Sam may well be a girl in terms of gender, but as far as she is concerned, she identifies as a boy, and she wants a different future than the one Lucy desires.

In a story of family, the history of the ravaged American West, adventure, where family history is posthumously written, fantastical symbolic tigers and buffalo roam free, Lucy and Sam begin together, only to separate, but are destined to come together again. Zhang writes the most exquisite of prose, in this unforgettable, beautifully imagined storytelling, with its magical realism elements, of the complexities of family, of the commonality of the immigrant experience, the conflicts, the place of the culture and traditions of the home they have left, the battle to survive, the need to weave a new sense of identity, issues surrounding gender, race, and the wall of hostility endured in the place that has now become home. This may well be historical fiction but Zhang's novel resonates with and speaks to us of our world as it is now, of how little has changed, of people driven by their fears and insecurities to blame immigrants for all their woes, ruthlessly exploited by populist politicians, ensuring that the immigrant experience remains a emotionally heartbreaking nightmare. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Little, Brown for an ARC.

This vibrant and descriptive novel is set in the western United States largely in the 1860s at the time when the area is being opened up to western settlers due to the discovery of gold deposits. The tale is largely told through the perspective of Lucy, only 12 at the start of the story. She is living with her younger sister Sam (by this time passing as a boy) and her Ba. Ma is a matter of memory as she apparently died in childbirth some years previously. The family, as the story reveals, are Chinese so the rules (and laws) for them are different and unkind. They live in a poor shack; Ba has a job in the local (coal) mines, but is still also trying (illegally) to find gold deposits. Within presenting a plot “spoiler”, in short, Ba will die and Sam will insist that, following Chinese tradition, his body be taken to the correct place for burial. So the girls set off into the wilds to find it. After the burial there are new choices to be made. Lucy would like to settle in a secure place, Sam wants to move elsewhere but is not sure where. Lucy moves to a small town nearby and sets up life there. But the reappearance of Sam some years later trips off a series of problems and they both have to move on.
The novel is about the Chinese immigrant experience in these harsh times – times exacerbated by race and sexual discrimination which makes vulnerable people even more so. What little that can be acquired or achieved can be wiped out by violence, weather or law changes in an instance – we are shown many instances of this. In time flashbacks we are also told of the experiences of both Ba and Ma when they arrived in the States – their false expectation of what life would be like, what compromises they had to make and their actions for survival. They show the reader how they married, had children and through scarcity grew to be the people their children saw (and were moulded by) in their earlier years, Sam, adhering to his father, will carry a different experience or understanding than Lucy who was closer to her mother and had more of the earlier family life where US realities were melded with Chinese family culture before things became increasingly desperate.
Lucy is shown as having a deep visceral attachment to the land and landscape in which she was born and raised– these form her sense of place as to where she should be. The landscape itself is a key character in this novel – depicted in a strong visual way with a full sense of place – from geology and soil through to plants and beasts, water, weather and scarcity. Zhang has quietly peopled it with characters: hardworking, often short lived, lazy, kind, careless and parasitical all totally believable. She has created a secure sense of time as well, pulling no punches about what went on in the past but casually recognising people’s constraints and weaknesses that led to their choices and actions.
Zhang is a brilliant story teller for all these reasons. The only criticism one might make (being pernickety) is that to unravel the tale of the girls’ parents, when the children were orphaned so young, the achievements and understandings of the girls are perhaps greater than likely – so this aspect requires a suspension of disbelief. – although young orphaned children being left vulnerable and open to abuse was real. But do not let that put you off from reading this first rate novel. Emigration to new lands and cultures, having to cope with difference, hostility and harsh finances; watching children grow with different experiences, values and understanding of home are not just “historical” issues. What do family, community, respect and decency really mean? The images and questions of this tale continue to haunt.

How Much Of These Hills Is Gold by C.Pam Zhang

While not a literary style in my wheelhouse, I appreciate the author’s intent and the complexity of her story.

Immigrant siblings Lucy, the elder, and Sam, the younger leave their home on horseback after both Ma and Ba have passed and left them young, unattended orphans. There is no way for them to stay in their gold rush town now. Ba must be buried and is carried along with them for 2 months before that happens, because they must bury him properly. In the meantime, every aspect of their lives with Ma and Ba, including beatings, must be rehashed to be sure they understand the family traditions and values.

Their many years’ search for a new home takes them along a path to meet strangers and barter for their needs. There is a magical realism about all this in the reoccurrence of Ma’s tiger drawings, reference to bones and visions, with very little dialog between the siblings. They are very different beings.

This story seems to be very well respected by other reviewers. Though it was not my cup of tea, I will give it four stars, as I know there is a special place for it with an audience for this genre.

My thanks to #LittleBrownBookGroupUK and #NetGalley for an ARC for my review.

On her website, C Pam Zhang describes herself as “Writer, perpetually restless.”

“Perpetually restless” is a good description of the feel of this book. Perhaps in particular of the character Sam, sibling to the main character Lucy.

As the book opens, Lucy and Sam find their father, Ba, has died during the night and they set off to find a place in which to bury him. We are in California in 1862, only not quite the California you might expect. There seem to be tigers, for one thing (although you may find yourself questioning this at various points in the narrative). In an interview at kenyonreview.org, the author talks about the importance of speculative fiction for minority writers and what she says, although said about her work The Wolf Girl of Terezia, casts a light on what she is doing in this new novel:

”Absolutely. Terezia is an invention, but in some sense, all “home” countries are inventions to the children of immigrants. One cross-cultural commonality I’ve observed is how the children of immigrants often experience huge gaps in our parents’ narratives of getting from there to here. The Filipina-American author Elaine Castillo calls this the “lacunae” of diaspora communities. I love that. I also like to think of it as a haze, a mistiness.

This mistiness seems particularly true for immigrants who came in pursuit of a “better” life. Maybe the mist is actually shame for their original poverty, or pain over what they’ve lost, or the all-consuming 24/7 hunger/panic/grimness/hustle of getting that new life. Speculative fiction lets me turn real-life mistiness into actual mist in a fantasy country called Terezia. There I can let my imagination tromp around without stepping on a culture I’m inexpert in.”

“What makes a home a home?” is a repeated question through the novel and the immigrant experience one of the key themes. Alongside this, the book looks at the meaning of history and how what is truth depends on who gets to tell the story. The whole mythology aspect of the book allows Zhang to explore this.

The story is told in four sections that jump around in time. After the burial story, we head back in time to see more about Lucy and Sam’s parents, then forward again to listen to a posthumous narrative from Ba to Lucy, then further forward to see Lucy settled in a township until she is surprised by the return of Sam who has been away for five years. Sam’s return coincides with rumours of a tiger…

The writing throughout is very evocative. Each chapter has a single word title (and chapter titles are used again and again in the different sections) with each title (Mud, Salt, Skull, Wind…) capturing a key element of the life described in that chapter.

This is a good story and I would not be surprised to see this book on one or more longest during the year.

My thanks to Little Brown for an ARC via NetGalley.

How Much of These Hills is Gold is a story of family and yearning, set in a dramatic American landscape. Lucy and Sam's father is dead and they are, aged twelve and eleven, off to find a new way to survive. The American Gold Rush is getting old, people aren't always welcome to them as Chinese-Americans, and they are haunted by their childhoods and their parents. As the narrative moves from present to past to future, it is clear that family and secrets aren't uncomplicated and people (and nations) can rewrite their history.

This is an unexpected novel, a kind of Western historical novel told mostly from a third person female perspective through Lucy and with gender identity and presentation explored through Sam. It also has a real focus on familial myths and shared imagery, particularly the image of the tiger that was so important to their mother. The characters are complex and interesting, though at least the initial story by necessity contains a lot of travelling around the American West, which wasn't very compelling. However, as the narrative is split into four different parts, it moves on in different ways which changes the pace. It was hard not to want more about Sam, but Lucy's perspective was a good way to look at an eldest daughter's role in her family and how she had to reconcile her desire for learning with a lot of other things.

The genesis of this novel was in a short story (available here and which serves as a great introduction to the two key characters in the novel, its themes and its writing style: https://longreads.com/2017/08/03/and-how-much-of-these-hills-is-gold/) which now forms the opening of the novel.

Two just-orphaned Chinese-descent siblings, 12-year old Lucy (the third party narrator) and her 11-year old sister Sam (who dresses and largely identifies as a boy), head out into post Gold-rush ’62 California wilderness with a horse they stole from Lucy’s old schoolteacher and the body of their gold-prospector-turned-coal-miner-turned-secret-prospector father.

The book is told in four sections: the first in ’62 tells of Lucy and Sam’s escape and Sam’s quest both for a burial place for their father and a hidden wilderness where he believes that giant buffalo and even tigers still roam. The second goes back to ’59 and tells of the events that lead to their escape: their mother having been buried in an unmarked grave by her father after the premature still-birth of their younger brother in a storm, shortly after a small fortune that the family had accumulated (so as to buy a passage back to China) had been taken from them, an event which lead to their father’s descent into despondency, alcoholism and domestic violence.

Both sections are recounted in an evocative and descriptive prose, shot through with description of the still basic Wild American West (each section featuring chapters named Gold, Plum, Salt, Skull, Wind, Mud, Meat, Water or Blood and where each chapter’s title captures a crucial and elemental part of the essence of the life described in it), with Lucy’s memory of the Chinese folklore, snatches of language and Zodiacal 12-hour system (again that system often informing the events of the chapter). The motif a Tiger – precious to their mother – reoccurs frequently.

The third section is a departure – a single-chapter posthumous account by their father of his and their mother’s backstory, an account which as it proceeds appears not so much as having been discovered and read posthumously as written posthumously and unread/undiscovered by Lucy.

The fourth it set 5 years after the first (and returns to the chapter structure of the first two) – the now 17-year old Lucy living in a town, having been befriended by a Gold-mine heiress has her immersion into some form of domesticity thrown up in the air by the return of Sam after five years of gambling, prospecting, possibly stealing and adventure. Sam’s arrival is preceded by a rumoured Tiger hunting on the outskirts of the town – something which is not coincidental. Sam and Lucy then head for the Coast and passage to China as their past threatens to catch up on them.

The American-West described in the tale has some seeming anomalies – not least the Tiger and Buffalo – and possesses something of a mythical nature.

This is very deliberate; the author has said of the realisation that crucially inspired the writing of the book:

"Generations of authors have molded the mythology of the American West for their own purposes. I grew up on John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Awed, I believed the settings of those books to be gritty, factual, real. As an adult I’ve learned how much of the West in those stories is fiction or exaggeration – including their overwhelming whiteness. I don’t appreciate those books any less. Rather, I take from them the lesson that I, too, have the freedom and audacity to invent the lesson that we call history is not granite but sandstone – soft, given form by its carvers. And hasn’t that always been the way of the American West, epic and beautiful, conflicted and stolen, paradoxical and maddening, which has so captured the imagination that it is difficult to disentangle the myths from reality?"

In particular, her own myth-remolding serves as a way to examine two key aspects: the meaning of truth and history and who gets to tell it and the timeless pressures of the immigrant experience – particularly the second or third generational immigrant, caught between two lands. .

Lucy over time realises the power of paper – and of who is writing the story. As a child she is temporarily taken under the wing of a school teacher who has travelled from the East Coast on a self-motivated charitable enterprise to teach the miner’s children (and to document his results) and sees Lucy as a special project

"The teacher smiles. “He who writes the past writes the future too.’ Do you know who said that?” He bows. “I did. I’m a historian myself, and may require your assistance in my newest monograph. "

When later, following Sam retaliating to some racist bullying, they are summarily expelled by him: “You may go,” the teacher says at last. “All the work we’ve done is useless now.” His voice is bitter. “You understand I’ll be removing you from the history—there’s no value in a half-finished chapter.

Later in the town, the framed deeds to the Gold holdings of her friends father, stand in stark contrast to her father’s undocumented Gold discoveries and their different fates (her father dying in poverty, robbed of what he had, her friend’s father wealthy and powerful from what he has legally taken from others) act as a constant reminder of the power of paper and writing to control legitimacy

In terms of the immigrant experience: Lucy herself is caught by conflicting pressures and yearnings. Her own conservative inclination is towards civilisation, safety, anonymity and she is most intrigued by the tales she hears from her short-term schoolteacher of the American East:
Repeatedly even in the melting-pot of the West she is made aware of her foreigness and lack of belonging (of course by those who have only just stolen the land from the Indians and the buffalo) – her appearance always marking her out, causing people to question her origins and making it clear:

"This land is not your land."

Her thoughts are further confused by the different identities (and even tricks to remember them) that are drummed into her from a young age by her father (keen to make it clear that the land belongs to her and she to it) and her mother (keen to remind her of her family base)
A tension captured in:

"There’s no one like us here, Ma said sadly and Ba proudly. We come from across the ocean, she said. We’re the very first, he said. Special, he said."

Overall an entertaning story, one which I can see featuring on prize lists this year.

I found this slow-going but well written. It was very moody and dark, about a struggle for place and power and belonging. I liked the angle of the book - gold rush is such an interesting era and it was good to see that world from a new perspective.

I found this lyrical debut to be both heartbreakingly beautiful and profoundly moving. It’s an intimate tale that explores the bonds between family, There is a hint of magical realism and a dash of western adventure. The prose is beautiful and the characters are fiercely real. Storytelling at its very best.

A remarkable first novel from C Pam Zhang in which nothing is as it first seems. Set in arid California landscape at the tail end of the Gold Rush, it follows the young lives of Lucy and Sam, siblings orphaned by the death of their father. Forced to flee the hovel they called home, Lucy and Sam traverse this unforgiving land, looking for a spot to bury their father. We get glimpses of their childhood, spent moving from one place to another, defined by poverty, discrimination and failed dreams of a better life.

C Pam Zhang’s writing is gorgeous and lyrical. The landscape itself is a character, denuded of anything green and living, rivers and lakes dried up, the buffalo long gone, indigenous people displaced by the greed of prospectors. Displacement and survival, identity and belonging are some of the themes explored. Lucy and Sam are from a Chinese family, I’m deliberately not saying Chinese-American because such definition would have been inconceivable to characters populating the novel. Lucy is seen alternately as almost alien-like curiosity by a teacher working on a monograph of the peoples and as not much more than an exotic dress up doll by a rich girl who befriends her. What defines us and how we define ourselves is very much a theme, Lucy and Sam define themselves by their family bonds, by the memory of their mother’s stories of a land far away, by the land they were born in, the land their father felt close to, by the deprivations and discrimination, by their will to survive.

Some of the themes in How Much of These Hills reminded me a little of Tea Obreht’s Inland, another remarkable recent novel about peoples settling the American west. Like Obreht, C Pam Zhang has a unique perspective, a strong voice and is a marvellous storyteller. Definitely an author to follow.

My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group and Virago for the opportunity to read and review How Much of These Hills is Gold.

Eastern myth meets the Western frontier.

Set in the Californian Gold Rush, Lucy and Sam are the orphaned children of immigrants. They escape the mining town where they live but have never belonged, in search of a place they can call home.

Zhang’s writing is lyrical and surprising. She misdirects the reader, overthrowing assumptions and temporal rules to deliver a stirring and thought-provoking epic.

An original, stunning debut.