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Book Reviewed by:From the author of the National Book Award finalist Patron Saints of Nothing comes an emotionally charged, moving novel about four generations of Filipino American boys grappling with identity, masculinity, and their fraught father-son relationships.
Watsonville, 1930. Francisco Maghabol barely ekes out a living in the fields of California. As he spends what little money he earns at dance halls and faces increasing violence from white men in town, Francisco wonders if he should've never left the Philippines.
Stockton, 1965. Between school days full of prejudice from white students and teachers and night shifts working at his aunt's restaurant, Emil refuses to follow in the footsteps of his labor organizer father, Francisco. He's going to make it in this country no matter what or who he has to leave behind.
Denver, 1983. Chris is determined to prove that his overbearing father, Emil, can't control him. However, when a missed assignment on "ancestral history" sends Chris off the football team and into the library, he discovers a desire to know more about Filipino history―even if his father dismisses his interest as unamerican and unimportant.
Philadelphia, 2020. Enzo struggles to keep his anxiety in check as a global pandemic breaks out and his abrasive grandfather moves in. While tensions are high between his dad and his lolo, Enzo's daily walks with Lolo Emil have him wondering if maybe he can help bridge their decades-long rift.
Told in multiple perspectives, Everything We Never Had unfolds like a beautifully crafted nesting doll, where each Maghabol boy forges his own path amid heavy family and societal expectations, passing down his flaws, values, and virtues to the next generation, until it's up to Enzo to see how he can braid all these strands and men together.
Francisco
October 1929
Watsonville, CA
The Fog
The fog cloaks the orchard in the cold pre-dawn darkness. It holds the Pajaro Valley close as a secret, reducing everything to a suggestion of itself. Muted shapes emerging, dissolving.
The hills on the horizon. The shallow-rooted apple trees growing in straight rows. The silent brown men, young and old, shaking off dreams as they drift, unmoored, through the haze on their way to begin the day's work. Francisco Maghabol is among them, shouldering a heavy wooden ladder, with an empty burlap sack slung across his chest. Faded hat, worn gloves, threadbare clothes. Sixteen years old now, fifteen when he stepped into the belly of the boat that carried him from Manila to Japan to Hawai'i to California. Across the sea to where the streets were strewn with gold—at least that's what the missionaries and the teachers and the ticketing agents and the leaflets and the Hawai'ianos had said...
This is very much a character-driven novel. Although each timeline has its own small plot, there is no overarching storyline. Rather, the narrative focuses on the typical complexities of father-son relationships compounded by cultural expectations, racial prejudice, and the desire to find one's place in the world. Enzo's story is particularly interesting because it takes place during the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic; readers will have lived through the events of this time themselves and can see how one family is forced to grapple with personal, relational, and societal problems that are no longer possible to ignore because of social isolation...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Jordan Lynch).
Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay explores the lives of four generations of men in the Maghabol family. The family's patriarch, Francisco, leaves the Philippines to seek work in America in the 1920s. Francisco quickly discovers that the stories he's heard of a country full of acceptance and success for immigrants are fantasies. A combination of harsh working conditions and racial prejudice pushes him to become a strike organizer. Although Francisco's role in the Filipino American agricultural worker strikes along the West Coast in the 1960s is fictional, the strikes themselves are not.
Filipino immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1920s and '30s, drawn by the promise of plentiful work and good pay. During this ...
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