Everything We Never Had by Randy RibayMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Four stars for this one but I don’t think I’ll be putting it on the “why isn’t this a bloody movie yet” list, only because it’s a powerful book that would be even more difficult to stomach in visual form. But let’s be honest, Ribay is a shoo in for the National Book Award again on this one. Back in his Filipino-American contemporary milieu for the first time in five years, this book combines a lot of aspects of his previous books - mixed race Filipino-American boys who don’t have the best relationships with their families, as well as pointed political commentary about racism in America and colonialism and corruption in the Philippines.
This time, Ribay tells the story through four generations of young men - Francisco, a migrant farm worker on the California coast caught up in the Watsonville riots; Emil, who seeks to be as all-American as possible to reject his father’s unionist legacy; Chris, who wants to learn about his family and national history and rejects his father’s support of Reagan and Marcos; and Enzo, the modern boy struggling with anxiety that only gets worse when Covid strikes.
Though I’m not Filipino, I can still see (as I did with Patron Saints of Nothing) some commonalities between my own family of Maltese immigrants (particularly the political differences between some generations) and the Maghabol men of certain ages. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if there weren’t some hidden connections to Ribay’s other novels - the Philadelphia setting for Enzo’s chapters being the same hometown as Bunny and Nasir from After the Shot Drops, or Francisco’s full name including “Reguero,” which makes me wonder if Jay Reguero from Patron Saints could be a distant cousin of Enzo’s.
At least I know Ribay isn’t going to take five years to write his next book, not when he’s set to publish his next Roku book for Chronicles of the Avatar next year…
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