A review by black_girl_reading
Insurrecto by Gina Apostol

2.0

About two contemporary women, a filmmaker and a writer, travelling around the Philippines with a duelling narrative about an uprising against the Americans in 1901, this book tried to do all of the things. What I liked: 1. The idea of the book. There is an important story in there somewhere. 2. The badassery of the Filipinx folks that disrupts the western narratives of sweetness, forbearance and whatever other lies we tell ourselves to justify the labour we demand in the west 3. Some of the complex-ass history of colonialism in the Philippines (it is a long storied history of multiple colonizations, it’s a lot to parse - holy hell). What I didn’t like 1. It was hard to follow. Really hard to follow. I know I missed a lot. 2. Too many storylines. I couldn’t get invested. Some twists and turns were extraneous and unimportant. I had a hard time landing in the novel. 3. It was too in it’s own head. I called it both fussy and tortured at times. Apparently it had pages of reference material in the book? There was so much that was inaccessible to the listener. 4. It tried to fit too much into one book. Curse of the second novel? Being tricky on purpose? Idk but it lost me in it’s attempted scope in few pages. By book buddy told me that a review called it metafiction and I think that’s a nice way of saying “it’s too dense to parse and it feels like it’s trying to pull a fast one on you”. I would try her first novel to see if this was aberration, so that speaks to her capacity as an author I suppose?