Review: Patron Saints of Nothing

Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: death of a loved one, racist aggressions both micro and macro, allusions to drug use, allusions to prostitution, allusions to human trafficking.

Randy Ribay returns with another gripping story, this one largely set in his native Philippines, and dealing with a little-known issue in the West - Duterte's drug war. Though Duterte is pretty notorious for a lot of reasons in this country - just look at the episodes of Madam Secretary featuring a thinly disguised version of the man who tries to grab Elizabeth McCord and she punches him in the face for it - his drug war was something I'd heard almost nothing about until reading this book.


And Jay Reguero, our narrator, knows little about it too until he learns that his cousin Jun - someone he loved like a brother, even if they didn't get to see each other for literally half their lives - has been shot as a result of it. Which is why he returns to the Philippines for the first time since he was a child, to try and figure out what the hell the truth is - because even if he'd heard nothing from Jun for quite some time, even if his last letters were increasingly despairing in tone, Jun would never turn to drugs...would he?

Jay's just gotta know.

And the answers he finds, well, I won't spoil them. But as with his previous book After the Shot Drops, Ribay doesn't pull his punches. This book feels a little slower in pace than Ribay's last one, though that's because there's even more to unpack, half a world away. The mysteries of Jun's life - and his involvement in trying to right some despicable wrongs committed in the seedy underbelly of these islands. Jay's struggles to connect to the Filipino side of his family (being Filipino and white, he gets some venom spewed at him by his worst tito because his mixed race contributes to the perception that he's too American) and learn the ways of a culture from which he descends, but knows precious little. Even the local languages, he struggles with - most of the time, he needs a friend or cousin to accompany him as a translator.

If there was an alternate universe where I had a cousin in Malta like Jun, and he'd gotten involved in trying to put a stop to local corruption on that island (for years, I'm sorry to say, Malta's had a certain Mafioso reputation), that would probably be the closest I could get to living Jay's story. And that's how I found my way to connect with this text quite a lot.

Well, that and Jun's severely lapsed Catholicism, for a ton of reasons I extra-relate to.

For sure, this book and After the Shot Drops cement Ribay's place on my "must read" list. Which means I STILL need to go back and get An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes at some point...

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