Little Saigon

Little Saigon by T. Jefferson Parker

I had a really difficult time getting into "Little Saigon" The main characters never really seemed real or believeable to me so I didn't much care what happened to them.

And I know it sounds superficial but I really hated 2 of the characters names. What adult male would allow himself to be called 'Benny' Once you reach adulthood its time to move on to 'Ben' or 'Bennet', which was the characters given name.

Also the name 'Chuck' every time I read it I saw Peppermint Patty talking to Charlie Brown, which is not the image you want when reading a thriller/mystery.

Only the last couple of chapters tying things together allowed 'Little Saigon' 3 stars instead of 2.

In spite of all this there were 2 worthwhile quotes, the first on page 248

And Frye knew that the last ten years of his life had been a slow retreat
from his family, his wife, his own future. When you ignore enough
problems, he thought, they become one problem. And the more you ignore it
the faster it grows until you end up sitting on a cold beach, wondering if the
one thing in your life you do well is going to kill you. More than
anything, you hate yourself for being afraid.
I want back in. I can try.

Very good introspection for Chuck, although it still takes him the rest of the book to start pulling himself together.
Now the next quote on page 375

He brought himself to the corner and waited, gun raised, stinking of death
and of a fear beyond death, wondering why things get funneled down to such
narrow, to such irrevocable moments. It was you choice, he
thought. You could be a thousand miles away if you wanted to be,
washing
your hands, forseeing reasonable futures, tending curable
wounds. The
simple awful truth is that somehow, this is where you
set out to end
up. Somethimes the best thing you can do is
the worst thing you can
imagine.

It made me think about all the small choices we make, or choices that we think are small, that end up having a huge impact on the rest of our lives. Each choice that we make is limiting the choices that we will have in the future. Once you realize that your choices in the past are leading you to what seems an unavoidable future, what do you do? Since we can't go back in time to change the choice of our past, our choices in the present are limited. So how do we change the future.