From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s powerful debut collection explores the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s. A college student leans on her brother, a laborer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere-and, sometimes, turning back again.Ī pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. I love KA's writings, maybe I'm off and this is why my review is not better than it is, I'm looking forward to the writing style KA is capable of giving.These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. It was nice to touch base with characters we know and love but sometimes their appearances seemed to be forced as if they were on a checklist and had to be mentioned. I appreciate the diversity of her characters (those who read KA know she is not an author who has been recently woke by current events) but I know no young Black people who speak like that. As well, not sure what was going on with 'language' the young Black characters spoke. Not sure how/when Dutch and Georgie found chemistry-this has always been one of KA's strengths and it's missing here.
It's not that this was a novella, it's just that it wasn't a solid story.
This seemed to a situation of "I've got to get this done so let me throw something together". KA's novellas are generally a full fleshed out story.
The only thing this story was missing was a kidnapping. However, as of late her Chaos books seem to be produced from the same template. Kristen Ashley has always been one of my favorite authors.
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