This historical fiction started strong as an artist, Tran Van Minh, the son of a petit bourgeois family in Hanoi, finds himself pressed into service with Ho Chi Minh's army to fight the French colonialists in the year leading up to the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. There's tension as he has to fear being killed by the enemy as well as his own comrades if his privileged background is revealed.

Unfortunately, the narrative just runs out of steam halfway through as the paranoia goes on a little too long and Minh spends a lot of time just marching around before he settles into a boring role drawing propaganda.

I found it annoying that while the story is entirely in first-person narrative, we are given access to secondary characters thoughts . . . but only when they are thinking how handsome Minh is. It becomes drinking game ludicrous at a certain point, and I started to wonder if the author was self-inserting and stroking his own ego.

(Best of 2023 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto NPR's Books We Love 2023: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels list.) ( )