Patron Saints of Nothing

 

My Thoughts:

When this book showed up on NetGalley, it was just an excerpt, but this title kept calling me, whether I was at NCTE, an ALAN workshop or even the #disrupttext site so I grabbed the excerpt thinking that a little tease would be better than not reading it at all.

Sometimes for reasons I cannot fathom, my best decisions happen as chance or leaps of faith. This is one of those. As I head to the bookstore to pick up this book, I just needed to write down my thoughts first because this book needs to be talked about here in Hawaiʻi and I have not heard local librarians and teachers talking about this yet, despite the fact that 40% of our public school students identify as Filipino or part Filipono.  I just attended the Hawaii children's literature conference this month and as middle grade and high school teachers and librarians in Hawaiʻi we just have to do a better job of keeping up with what is being published and start getting more BIPOC, AAPI, Oceania authors in the hands of our local students.

Start with this one.  Use this as a  novel to replace some of the canonical pieces you have in the closet collecting dust. Use the #disrupttext guide for this book to get other ideas for your classroom. Use this book to start uncomfortable but necessary conversations around equity, family, kuleana. Read this. Use this. Pass it on. 

Besides being a great story, Randy Ribay's writing is so rich I found myself rereading certain images. One of my favorites is when the main character, Jay starts delving into the death of his cousin. His research just gets him so disturbed, but he is even more irritated when his white friend, Seth, seems to know more about what is going on in the Philippines than Jay who is half Filipino. 

"Man," he [Seth] says, shaking his head, "I forgot you're Filipino.". . ."You're basically white."

I stop, stung. "What do you mean by that?". . .

Seth: "I don't see color, man," he says. "We're all one race: the human race. That's all I meant."

"No it's not," I say. And even if it is, that's kind of f*#%ed up. First, to assume white is default. Second, to imply that difference equals bad instead of simply different.

I would love to pull an excerpt like this and start a p4c (philosophy for children) discussion where students come up with their own vanilla questions around this excerpt, vote on the question they want to talk about and have that student lead/start off the discussion.

I want to end my thoughts by going back to the book, as I do not want to just leave that excerpt without any kind of end. Basically Jay cannot let it go. He wants to know why Seth thinks he is white. Seth says to promise not to get offended and continues.

"You talk like everyone else. You dress like everyone else. And you, like, do the same stuff as everyone else.". . .

"What would you expect me to do?" I ask. "Walk around draped in the Philippine flag?" Jay then stomps off home as he realizes that Seth doesn't and can't understand why Jay is so upset.

It's a sad thing when you map the borders of a friendship and find it's a narrower country than you expected.

From the Publisher:

Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs, and no one in the family wants to talk about what happened, Jay travels to the Philippines to find out the real story.

Hoping to uncover more about Jun and the events that led to his death, Jay is forced to reckon with the many sides of his cousin before he can face the whole horrible truth -- and the part he played in it.

As gripping as it is lyrical, Patron Saints of Nothing is a page-turning portrayal of the struggle to reconcile faith, family, and immigrant identity.