Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.

The geneal impression of How Much of these Hills is Gold was positive, but everyone marked it around the middle of the scale. On the positive side, we like the way the diasporic experience was written through the characters. Lucy and Sam's alienation -- that they aren't from across the ocean (Chinese, we assume) but they aren't accepted in the place where they grew up -- was depicted in a powerful way, and the concept of home that runs through the entire novel is rendered emotionally and effectively painfully in lots of different forms -- the ramshackle family house, the father's gravesite, and town of Sweetwater. The characters themselves were complex and interesting. In particular, we found Sam radiant and vivid, and we loved the ambivalent opportunism of the Mother. Zhang writes all of this very well, and even Ba comes off sympathetically at points. That said, it's a painful book, and many of us wondered why we needed to keep seeing these characters suffer. The end particularly irked us -- have Lucy turn to sex work just seemed cheap and unearned when all of it was off of a contrivance of Sam's past crimes and convenient capture. This point to another issue some of us had. The story is not a story of the Chinese experience in the American West. While the book does feature historic elements such as the railroad labor exploitation, it studiously eschews the historic community building Asian Americans did to feature an isolated and ostracized family. This led to a long discussion of whether the book was intended to be a story of the Chinese immigrant experience, or a less representative story of a single unique family. Detractors argue that the magically real elements of the book -- the coincidental meetings, the use of jackels and buffalo as metaphors -- meant the book had to be a parable, but others argued that the individual character identities belied that. However, despite all of this. the room landed in a similar place. Zhang wrote an evocative study of a family that was too contrived in its torture of its character and made some bad choices at the end. It's an interesting book, and we didn't feel like we wasted our time, but the missteps here were enough to keep us from naming this one of our favorites.