Run Me to Earth
Paul Yoon, 2020
Simon & Schuster
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501154041
Summary
A beautiful, aching novel about three kids orphaned in 1960s Laos—and how their destinies are entwined across decades, anointed by Hernan Diaz as "one of those rare novels that stays with us to become a standard with which we measure other books."
Alisak, Prany, and Noi—three orphans united by devastating loss—must do what is necessary to survive the perilous landscape of 1960s Laos.
When they take shelter in a bombed out field hospital, they meet Vang, a doctor dedicated to helping the wounded at all costs.
Soon the teens are serving as motorcycle couriers, delicately navigating their bikes across the fields filled with unexploded bombs, beneath the indiscriminate barrage from the sky.
In a world where the landscape and the roads have turned into an ocean of bombs, we follow their grueling days of rescuing civilians and searching for medical supplies, until Vang secures their evacuation on the last helicopters leaving the country.
It’s a move with irrevocable consequences—and sets them on disparate and treacherous paths across the world.
Spanning decades and magically weaving together storylines laced with beauty and cruelty, Paul Yoon crafts a gorgeous story that is a breathtaking historical feat and a fierce study of the powers of hope, perseverance, and grace. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Weslyan University
• Award—New York Library Young Lion Award
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Paul Yoon is an American writer—author of two novels, Snow Hunters (2014) and Run Me to Earth (2020), and two short story collections, Once the Shore (2009) and The Mountain (2017).
His work has appeared in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories collection. The National Book Foundation him it one of its "5 under 35" awards.
Once on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, Yoon is now a Briggs-Copeland lecturer at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, the author Laura van den Berg. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrireved 3/28/2020.)
Book Reviews
Richly layered…. Throughout the novel, beauty and violence coexist in a universe that seems by turns cruel and wondrous…. Yoon has stitched an intense meditation on the devastating nature of war and displacement (Editor's Choice).
New York Times Book Review
Spellbinding…. With his panoramic vision of the displacements of war, Yoon reminds us of the people never considered or accounted for in the halls of power.
Washington Post
[A] gorgeous book about the bonds of friendship and the ruptures of war. Even more significantly, in telling the stories of a trio of Laotian teens, it inverts and reorients the American war story…. Yoon is a master of subtle storytelling often leaving powerful emotions unexpressed, violent acts undetailed.
Los Angeles Times
Yoon's artfully orchestrated narrative illuminates this loudest, harshest, most chaotic of situations with restraint and elegance, finding and tracing an emotional thread that weaves the story into the reader's heart…. This unique work of historical fiction could not be more timely, or more timeless.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
[Yoon] writes with a soft, measured hand. He calmly builds memorable scenes even when events turn violent.
Associated Press
Yoon’s greatest skill lies in crafting subtle moments that underline the strange and specific sadness inherent to trauma…. As children around the world continue to grow up surrounded by violence and war, authors like Yoon seek to understand how experiencing those horrors shapes the adults they eventually become. And in Run Me to Earth, those horrors are scattered like unexploded bombs, waiting to go off at any time.
Time
Engrossing and luminous…. Yoon crafts an exceptionally human and poignant story.
Newsweek
This story of three Laotian orphans making their way through their war-torn world in the 1960s asks important questions about what it means to feel safe, and to call a place home.
Vogue
Run Me to Earth isn’t trying to educate or do the work of scholars and teachers; it has its own agenda. Art cannot supplant history, but it can amplify it.
New Republic
Yoon asks whether anyone can truly survive the ruins of war in this sparely written gem.… Yoon’s eloquent, sensitive character study… illustrates how the horrors of the past can linger…. This is a finely wrought tale about courage and endurance.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Yoon, ever the elegant and penetrating writer, coolly delivers a devastating sense of what it’s like to be in the midst of war…. Yoon, ever the elegant and penetrating writer, coolly delivers a devastating sense of what it’s like to be in the midst of war
Library Journal
(Starred review) Yoon again exemplifies his unparalleled ability to create a quietly spectacular narrative that reveals the unfathomable worst and unwavering best of humanity; the result here provides mesmerizing gratification.
Booklist
(Starred review) [Yoon is] stretching his abilities while still writing with deliberate, almost vigilant care…. [His] imaginative prose and affection for his characters make the story… [a]nother masterpiece in miniature about the unpredictable directions a life can take.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Talking Points to help start a discussion for RUN ME TO EARTH … then take off on your own:
1. Consider how the violence of war and its continual bombing affects the three young children at the heart of Run Me to Earth.
2. In what way do the children manage to hold on to a shred of shared innocence, even as they sense that their lives will soon become harder.
3. Talk about how memories persist for years after the war, some filled with vivid suffering, others with deep tenderness. Which recollections most moved you—either because of their horror and brutality, or because of their humanity?
4. Alisak recalls the time he swallowed a tooth during a beating. "There were times this fact bothered him more than his own hunger or the sudden volley of gunfire." Why would that particular memory be so persistent?
5. What drives Prany to commit the violent acts that he does?
6. Twenty years after the end of the war, Khit tries to track down Alisak. Why does she search for him; what does she hope for. What did she and Prany feel for one another as teenagers, and how has that long ago connection affected her relations with her husband?
7. The novel begins and ends with Alisak. Why do you think the author made that choice? How has he been left after the war? How has the war continued to shape his life?
8. The novel begins as a single narrative line centered on the three children and Dr. Vang. Eventually, the storyline breaks up into separate strands. Talk about how the fractured structure reflects the shattered lives of the characters as a result of the ongoing war.
9. What is the complicity of America's intervention in Laos with the destruction it wrought?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)