A flash from the past! I read this book back in August 2020 for Wikathon and never uploaded the flash review to the blog. Whoops? But this is a great opportunity to share my love for Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay once again.
Look, have you ever read a book so good that it left you numb afterward because your brain legitimately cannot process how amazing the book was? That’s me right with this book.
Title: Patron Saints of Nothing
Author: Randy Ribay
Publisher: Kokila
Publication Date: 18th June 2019
TW/CW: Drug abuse, addiction, police brutality, racism, gun violence
Synopsis: A coming-of-age story about grief, guilt, and the risks a Filipino-American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin’s murder.
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.
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Table of Contents
Patron Saints of Nothing is a masterpiece.
It is an absolute must-read for everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or nationality. But it is especially important for us Filipinos in the diaspora to read this book. I have never read a book that has left me like this: in total shock and awe, ready to cry but also jump into action. It left me breathless but also left me nodding my head along because everything said here?
I felt it right in my bones.
“It strikes me that I cannot claim this country’s serene coves and sun-soaked beaches without also claiming its poverty, its problems, its history. To say that any aspect of it is part of me is to say that all of it is part of me.”
Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay
Ribay does not hold back. I would have never forgiven him if he did hold back. There area few big topics that Ribay examines in Patron Saints of Nothing:
- The diaspora’s struggles of never feeling like we belong here in the US or in the Philippines.
- Police brutality (and state-sponsored violence) in the Philippines
- Duterte’s drug war
- Poverty
- Addiction
Look, I have always preferred reading nonfiction when it comes to current events/history.
In fact, I tend to avoid fictional books that feature current events.
(This is another discussion for another time)
However, in this instance, I am so glad I picked this book up. Where some authors take real-life events/people and run them over for the sake of drama, Ribay does the complete opposite. He treats the stories, the people, and the topics with utter care and respect. Rather than abuse creative license, he takes the opportunity to shine a light on these topics and breathes life into his characters with his gut-wrenching and straight to the point prose.
And you know what?
Yes, this is a fictionalized account of Duterte’s real-life drug war that has left countless people dead and even more arrested. But Ribay brings the characters and the Philippines to life in between these pages. He took those stories that we may or may not have heard of thanks to the New York Times or the Washington Post’s occasional articles about the drug war and forces us to see these victims as people with their own stories to tell.
Randy captured everything about the Philippines: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The Philippines presented in this novel is not some fantasy version nor some romanticized version that those of us in the diaspora tend to create in our heads. It is the Philippines as it truly is in reality: full of beauty, corruption, and contradictions.
Final Word
Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay gets 5-stars with an A+ grade. I adore this book and I absolutely recommend it.
Have you read this book before?
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