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A review by therese_nook68
Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco
2.0
Dropping the book to a 2 instead of its initial 3/5 stars
I picked this book up thinking it was going to be more of a mystery due to the synopsis and was surprised to see that it was more of a glimpse into the sorry state of the Philippines.
And while I enjoyed seeing both good and bad parts of my home country, it wasn't enough to really salvage the mess that was the book.
I think that I would have enjoyed it more if it felt like it didn't try so hard to be a literary novel. There were so many things that were unnecessary and made comprehending this book a lot harder. For instance, there were a lot of big Oxford man words that were unnecessary and felt like it was an English major throwing them in during a class to sound elevated and intelligent when it felt really pretentious. The length of the chapters with so much information felt like an overload and hard to really understand the point in all the POVs and the parallels.
The ending was also rushed and didn't satisfy all of the mental hurdles I had to jump through to get to the end.
I picked this book up thinking it was going to be more of a mystery due to the synopsis and was surprised to see that it was more of a glimpse into the sorry state of the Philippines.
And while I enjoyed seeing both good and bad parts of my home country, it wasn't enough to really salvage the mess that was the book.
I think that I would have enjoyed it more if it felt like it didn't try so hard to be a literary novel. There were so many things that were unnecessary and made comprehending this book a lot harder. For instance, there were a lot of big Oxford man words that were unnecessary and felt like it was an English major throwing them in during a class to sound elevated and intelligent when it felt really pretentious. The length of the chapters with so much information felt like an overload and hard to really understand the point in all the POVs and the parallels.
The ending was also rushed and didn't satisfy all of the mental hurdles I had to jump through to get to the end.