Composed in compressed, laser-sharp interrogations of immigration and prejudice, colonialism and inheritance, Names for Light reads like poetry ... evokes recent works of Claudia Rankine ... With a keen ability to dissect English, Myint looks at names ... After taking readers through a fascinating ancestral chain, Myint provides a compressed autobiography in the book's final section (Section V). There, she writes her personal history in an ironic third person. As opposed to earlier, she brings readers to her writerly present in long paragraphs that often cover multiple pages ... For me, Names for Light was more of an embodied experience than a read, like swimming in a pool of exquisite reflections on family and rootedness and deracination and sorrow and love. Early on, Myint writes, 'Nothing has ever happened to me.' This 'is the reason I am the storyteller and not the story.' I look forward to immersing myself further in her gorgeous storytelling.

... uniquely structured ... Braiding these opposing timelines and narrative perspectives creates an innovative structure that effectively contrasts the author’s deep enmeshment with her family history with her distance from reality. On a line-by-line level, the book is spectacularly lyrical, and each word feels perfectly chosen. Some readers may struggle with the chronology and unnamed characters, but the text is undeniably powerful ... An imaginative and compelling memoir about what we inherit and what we pass on.

... makes ample use of blank space, between paragraphs, strings of thought, scenes and events. When not used, what’s there is jumbled and scattered ... this is what [Myint] achieves in her writing — she keeps herself to herself. In doing so, she makes the question of where she comes from illumined and voluminous ... Myint’s narrative shape is barely there. We get blips and cracks, 'a trace, a strip, or a corner of the memories,' a 'memory of a memory.' This family history is often recounted through others, like this: 'My father said my grandmother said' and 'My other grandmother, my mother’s mother' and 'My mother said my great-grandmother and great-grandfather.' This makes the prose clunky and cluttered, and the people difficult to feel and see and hear and remember ... The language is so concerned with being and looking pretty that what the story is about — political upheaval, death, heartbreak, violence, discrimination, the immigrant experience — is barely noticeable. The parents, particularly, don’t feel like real people, since we never get them in their adult mess ... This is a writer who does not know and is comfortable in not knowing. The gaze flinches ... It is one thing to be able to put feelings on paper and another to make a reader feel what we write. The narrow line between being a note taker and being a writer is worth discerning ... These are wonderful observations of language, but the writing does not move them beyond being duly noted. It certainly sounds like poetry, but it is not poetry ... The material Myint has before her is compelling, but they are memories and stories that are not hers. This is the problem for the children of immigrants and refugees when we set out to write memoirs. However special we think our lives are or however much we accomplish, our stories always pale in comparison — even more so when we lean on others’ to write our own. We, whom 'nothing has ever happened to,' are never as compelling as our parents.

... questions linger over her narrative. Whom is she writing for? Is she trying to reveal or conceal? Is she deceiving herself or trying to deceive others? Is this an attempt to reconnect with a family that obsesses her, but from whom she seems estranged? The mystical beauty of her prose, which seems to speak to us in intermittent revelations, transports us elsewhere, but it is an unnamable place, a territory of lostness ... At its simmering core, Names For Light is itself the 'place' where the family’s past – and Myint’s dynamically evolving present — approach each other. The tug and pull of these forces, and the broader awareness of tyranny in the world, comprise an environment for the reader that is both demanding in its multiple vectors and gratifying in its patterning and acute intelligence.

... hypnotic ... Lived experience is overlaid with speculative history, as Myint, who moved to the U.S. as a child, mines the alienation—sowed by the colonialism and racism endured by generations of her family—that has rendered her 'a ghost' throughout her life ... While her poetic narration is indisputably alluring, the nonlinear story line can sometimes become taxing. For those willing to put in the work, this serpentine narrative is a thing of beauty.

In a climate of rising anti-Asian hate crimes, this book is an urgent call for change ... What immediately stands out in the urgent call is Myint’s clear voice, as she explores personal and historical issues through lyrical evocations of cities and town such as Yangon, Madrid, South Bend, Sittwe, and Hinthada. At first, the locations overlay in a dizzying recollection, each chapter taking place in a different setting, conveying the author’s sense of inherited and acquired displacement. But the varied geography is an invitation to remember lived experience despite uprootedness and, perhaps most importantly for Myint, provides a canvas on which to appose orally-transmitted heritage to re-center among constant movement ... Myint embraces a world of haunting recollections, omens, and traditions—including Buddhist teachings on the transience and non-binary nature of our existence and what to call home. Her family story is reclaimed and is revived through her ... a poetic love letter to the people who make us who we are, and a reminder of the difficulty some face to find one’s way home.

If you can get past the knot of generational descriptors, geographical locations, and time periods, you will be richly rewarded with a deeply moving, lyrical contemplation of family history, individual identity, and home—one that lingers in your mind long after the book is over ... These moments of blankness are just as profound as Myint’s prose, serving as a visual for the irretrievable and unknowable, the vast silences between the stories and the people ... The technical and lyrical acrobatics of the book (shifts between first and third person, imagined feelings and thoughts of family members long gone or never known to her, fresh interpretations of myths, etymological twists and turns) all serve as tools for the author to interrogate the questions that most haunt her.