SOURCE: Bell, Madison Smartt. “At a Cultural Crossroads.” Chicago Tribune Books (23 February 1992): 3.

In the following review, Bell praises Butler's ability to assimilate the voices of Vietnamese people who have immigrated to America in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

With A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler reveals his discovery of a pocket of cross-cultural peculiarity, which has become, for him, a sort of writer's paradise. The place is Lake Charles, Louisiana, but the people are all Vietnamese, immigrants who came there in the aftermath of the war, Northerners and Southerners, Buddhists and Catholics, drawn by a climate similar to that of their lost nation. The community they form in the new world gives the 15 stories of Butler's collection a sort of novelistic unity, enhanced by his sharp insight into their ways, their beliefs and their reactions to life among strangers in a strange...