Run Me to Earth

Laos had over 2 million tons of ordinance dropped on it over a 9 year bombing campaign starting in 1964. That's the equivalent of a bomb every 8 minutes for those 9 years the US dropped in an area roughly the size of Utah. More bombs than it dropped during the entirety of WWII, and 30% of these cluster bombs have yet to explode.

It is against that backdrop that we are introduced to 3 orphans, Alisak, Prany and Noi living in an abandoned farmhouse turned makeshift hospital in the Plain of Jars. The children on motorbikes wend their way through unexploded ordinance to retrieve supplies and deliver patients. And it sounds unremittingly grim but proves a dreamlike read with the occasional bursts of searing violence.

The chapters swing across the years and traverse the globe taking us out of Laos and into France, New York and Spain. How these teenager can and cannot escape their past. Beautifully melancholic with perfectly realized grace notes throughout. Of things hid in a piano, the brush of a father's fingers against a child's heel as he drives beneath him in a tree, a bike shop and the smell of the ocean. Memories burnished to a shine and held close in contrast to those burning moments of horror. Just an incredibly written, finely wrought, hypnotizing piece of work.