This is historical fiction, about the Vietnamese wars, told through several generations of one Vietnamese family from the 1930s up to 2012, narrated mainly by the grandmother, Dieu Lan and her grand daughter Huong (aka Guava).
We agreed that the young Vietnamese author, Nguyen Phan Que Mai, writing her first novel in English, had clearly researched in depth, incorporating a huge amount of detail about family life - and loss - culture, beliefs, history and spirituality of her country. A few of us thought that she had filled the story with excessive information, but that was somewhat redeemed by her use of proverbs, poetry, symbolism and beautiful descriptions. Not everyone liked this; some felt it was too contrived and unnecessary and the style was not to everyone's taste. However, we felt that the content regarding the wars, and the horrific cruelty suffered by the Vietnamese people, was almost too much to bear; bringing home the current horrors of the ongoing wars in both Palestine and Ukraine making it all quite overwhelming.
Although we concluded that this was not a 'mature' piece of literature,  we all learnt something and commended the young author for writing about this tragic part of Vietnam's history.
Addendum: I  discovered that there are over 30,000 books about this period in Vietnam's history, historical fiction and non-fiction; and approximately 70,000 about WW2. People must have a vast appetite for reading about war but no appetite to learn or indeed change.