SOURCE: McCown, Cynthia. Review of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler. America 169, no. 19 (11 December 1993): 18-19.

In the following review, McCown notes the whimsical and romantic nature of the stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and asserts that the collection “celebrates courage and dignity.”

Olen Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story saga of the American Vietnam experience is not set in Vietnam nor is it about war. Instead, this sometimes whimsical, often moving collection presents the first-person narratives of those who came away—Vietnamese from North and South now living in the United States—and offers tales of heroism not in corporeal battle but in the spiritual struggle for faith and hope in the face of betrayal and impossibility.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is Butler's seventh work of fiction in a writing career that began with an acclaimed Vietnam novel...