“What they lose in that three-day storm: The roof of the shed. The dresses. The baby. The medicines. The three storybooks. Ba’s laugh. Ba’s hope. The prospecting tools. The gold in the house. The gold in the hills. All talk of gold. Ma.“
I’m Betty Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads" and that is a list from one of the chapters in C Pam Zhang’s novel How Much of These Hills is Gold. As the story begins Ba, the father of teen sisters Lucy and Sam, has just died and they set out to find an acceptable burial home for his body. Ba was a gold prospector who moved his family from place to place in search of enough gold so that they could buy land and finally have a home. It’s the end of the Gold Rush in the west and they travel by horse, a horse they’ve stolen from their teacher. It carries their father’s body in a trunk.
Subsequent chapters chronicle the loss of their mother days before they were to set out for the coast and passage on a ship back to their parent’s native Asian land; how their parents met; and what the sisters’ lives are five years after burying their father. They live in a time and place where an Asian face is a novelty and prejudice abounds.
There is so much to this novel, but an overarching theme is “what makes a home a home?” This is such a well written book. Here’s a sentence about Lucy finding a dead snake, “Lucy ran home with scales between her palms, aware that the world unfurled its hidden side.”
If you’re looking for a unique story beautifully written, then you must read How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang.
