Kam
Ngl, I was VERY excited to read this because it’s the kind of story I’ve wanted to tell for a while now, albeit in a different medium. Still, I’m glad someone decided to tell it in prose format, and that it got published so a wider audience gets to read it.
The reason I was so drawn to this type of story, and why I decided to read this book in the first place, is because it asks some very interesting questions about family legacy, and what one must do about it. I already kind of tackled that in my review of/reaction essay to Elaine Castillo’s America is Not The Heart: about what it means to know the truth about one’s family, and the kind of reckoning that comes with learning that truth. This novel approaches that question of legacy using Philippine folklore as a lens: the Sepulveda family is cursed for something they did in the past, and a lot of the story is spent not only learning about the origins of the curse, but also why it persists down the generations. The curse is a reckoning that the Sepulvedas must deal with now that their patriarch is dead, and what they do and do not do will spell the fate of their family.
Naturally, none of this is comfortable, and none of this is easy. This novel illustrates that unease and difficulty quite well, in my opinion, through the slowly unfolding drama of the Sepuveldas’ reunion. Throughout the novel, the family is confronted, again and again, with the curse that haunts them, and again and again they are given chances, both as an individuals and as a unit, to reckon with the origins of that curse. But they do not do more than pay lip service to that reckoning. Their complacency in the face of their family’s sins - complacency that exists because of the benefits they have reaped from those sins - means that they are unwilling to break the cycle, and thus they bring the curse down upon their own heads.
Now, while all of this is utterly fascinating and compelling - especially to people who have tried to do any similar kind of reckoning with their own family history and whatever dark secrets might lie therein - the actual writing doesn’t do the idea justice. While there’s nothing wrong with a slow burn narrative, the way this particular story is structured feels too scattered, with so many things going on at once and so much information being delivered that it’s like the author has completely lost control of the narrative. There is little to no build-up of tension of the kind that one might reasonably expect from a gothic novel or a horror novel - something I find disappointing, given that this novel uses the Philippines as a setting and Philippine folklore as key elements. It also doesn’t help that the characters aren’t very well developed, which is a pity as there is a LOT of potential storytelling that could have been done through them, instead of being dropped in some rather odd, random places over the course of the plot.
Overall, this is a novel with immense potential. The themes of legacy, complicity, privilege, and identity could all have been explored with great depth and complexity in the kind of story that this novel attempts to tell - few things are more horrific, after all, than confronting the truth hiding in one’s own family history, in one’s own blood. But all of that potential gets muddied in a plot that spreads itself too widely and too thinly across all the things it wants to tell, so that there is little to no tension created when there ought to be plenty of it going around. It also doesn’t help that the characters., who by rights ought to be the backbone of this novel, are not as strongly developed as they need to be to support the weight of the narrative. This novel could have been so much more than it is, but it does not, unfortunately, stick the landing.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.
Ngl, I was VERY excited to read this because it’s the kind of story I’ve wanted to tell for a while now, albeit in a different medium. Still, I’m glad someone decided to tell it in prose format, and that it got published so a wider audience gets to read it.
The reason I was so drawn to this type of story, and why I decided to read this book in the first place, is because it asks some very interesting questions about family legacy, and what one must do about it. I already kind of tackled that in my review of/reaction essay to Elaine Castillo’s America is Not The Heart: about what it means to know the truth about one’s family, and the kind of reckoning that comes with learning that truth. This novel approaches that question of legacy using Philippine folklore as a lens: the Sepulveda family is cursed for something they did in the past, and a lot of the story is spent not only learning about the origins of the curse, but also why it persists down the generations. The curse is a reckoning that the Sepulvedas must deal with now that their patriarch is dead, and what they do and do not do will spell the fate of their family.
Naturally, none of this is comfortable, and none of this is easy. This novel illustrates that unease and difficulty quite well, in my opinion, through the slowly unfolding drama of the Sepuveldas’ reunion. Throughout the novel, the family is confronted, again and again, with the curse that haunts them, and again and again they are given chances, both as an individuals and as a unit, to reckon with the origins of that curse. But they do not do more than pay lip service to that reckoning. Their complacency in the face of their family’s sins - complacency that exists because of the benefits they have reaped from those sins - means that they are unwilling to break the cycle, and thus they bring the curse down upon their own heads.
Now, while all of this is utterly fascinating and compelling - especially to people who have tried to do any similar kind of reckoning with their own family history and whatever dark secrets might lie therein - the actual writing doesn’t do the idea justice. While there’s nothing wrong with a slow burn narrative, the way this particular story is structured feels too scattered, with so many things going on at once and so much information being delivered that it’s like the author has completely lost control of the narrative. There is little to no build-up of tension of the kind that one might reasonably expect from a gothic novel or a horror novel - something I find disappointing, given that this novel uses the Philippines as a setting and Philippine folklore as key elements. It also doesn’t help that the characters aren’t very well developed, which is a pity as there is a LOT of potential storytelling that could have been done through them, instead of being dropped in some rather odd, random places over the course of the plot.
Overall, this is a novel with immense potential. The themes of legacy, complicity, privilege, and identity could all have been explored with great depth and complexity in the kind of story that this novel attempts to tell - few things are more horrific, after all, than confronting the truth hiding in one’s own family history, in one’s own blood. But all of that potential gets muddied in a plot that spreads itself too widely and too thinly across all the things it wants to tell, so that there is little to no tension created when there ought to be plenty of it going around. It also doesn’t help that the characters., who by rights ought to be the backbone of this novel, are not as strongly developed as they need to be to support the weight of the narrative. This novel could have been so much more than it is, but it does not, unfortunately, stick the landing.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.