Heather's Reviews > How Much of These Hills Is Gold

I picked up this book for the Kindle after reading about it in the New York Times.

Lucy and Sam are Chinese-Americans (though they don't know where their family is from), who set out to bury their Ba's corpse after their Ma is already gone. They live in the American West during the time of the Gold Rush. The middle sections of the book deal with the events that led up to losing their mother, then how their parents met from their father's perspective, before concluding with what happens to Lucy and Sam five years after their father's burial.

(view spoiler)[There were a lot of surprises in this book surrounding the characters and I liked the structure of the book for that reason. It surprised me that Sam turned out to be a girl and that we gradually came to understand that their mother hadn't died, but had left the family after giving birth to their dead brother.

In the beginning of the book, it had seemed like Ba was just a brutal, good-for-nothing abuser who emotionally twisted Sam into being his substitute son, but by the end of the book, it seemed more like that had been something that happened to Sam psychologically due to knowing that their mother had abandoned them.

It also helped to see that there was a good side to Ba, at least from Ba's perspective, and that Ma wasn't an entirely innocent character as the story unfolded.

Part of me kind of predicted that Lucy would become a prostitute since her Ma emphasized that beauty is a weapon, etc., and after burying Ba and ending up in the town of Sweetwater, Lucy realized that there would never be any real future for her in the states since society treated her like an outsider no matter what.

It did surprise me, though, that she became one to save Sam, in exchange for the gold man forgiving Sam's thievery, and that she then lashed out at Sam to push her to get on a ship back to China, which they had planned to do together. (hide spoiler)]

All of that added up to a huge adventure for these characters that highlighted the important reminder that people of color are still treated like this in the U. S. today--as though they are not American unless they're white enough (which is ironic, because indigenous people are the real Americans)! For Lucy and Sam, this caused a feeling that no real place was their "home"--not China, which only their mother remembered, nor the hills where they were born yet never accepted.

It was fascinating and refreshing to read a western story from the perspective of people who built much of the West, but don't receive much credit for it.

The title poses a question, suggesting the answer that a lot of the hills are gold, but that gold is only accessible to certain people--people who are already accepted by society and who make the laws to keep others down and out.