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A review by dee2799d
Wounded Little Gods by Eliza Victoria
5.0
I have six million other books to read (not really, ten is probably a better count) and I haven't really made time for any of them, but for an Eliza Victoria novel? You bet your sweet ass I have time.
What I really love about Eliza Victoria's stories is how relate-able they are. The characters who work for BPOs, who worry about the traffic in EDSA, and who makes jokes about hipsters. There's a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour in how Regina tries to keep track of the barrage of countryside news her parents meet her with when she goes back home. But also a lot of heartwhen she looks at her parent at the end of the novel and realises what they had gone through, and how parental love is a complex thing .
And I know what many other Filipino writers have done the same, that we have a lot of Philippine spec lit in the market that ventures into the realm of urban fantasy and (more or less) relate-able characters, but this feels different. Personally, I'm inclined to think it has to do with age and class. Regina (and a lot of characters from the author's other work) is a millennial in her 20s, still living in that brink between after-uni and the 'real world'. She still lives in a dorm shared with university students. She's earning enough that she doesn't have to worry over-much about money, but she doesn't own a condo with amazing furniture either. The in-betweens, the middle to lower middle class. This is a life I'm very very familiar with and it comforts me to see those familiar trappings in a written world. A written world with fantastic and mythic themes.
So I haven't really written anything about the plot or the storyline and I'm not gonna go into it at length (there's historical facts, eugenics, and the complexity of love and human interactions), but I just want to say that I'd love to read more novels like this.
What I really love about Eliza Victoria's stories is how relate-able they are. The characters who work for BPOs, who worry about the traffic in EDSA, and who makes jokes about hipsters. There's a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour in how Regina tries to keep track of the barrage of countryside news her parents meet her with when she goes back home. But also a lot of heart
And I know what many other Filipino writers have done the same, that we have a lot of Philippine spec lit in the market that ventures into the realm of urban fantasy and (more or less) relate-able characters, but this feels different. Personally, I'm inclined to think it has to do with age and class. Regina (and a lot of characters from the author's other work) is a millennial in her 20s, still living in that brink between after-uni and the 'real world'. She still lives in a dorm shared with university students. She's earning enough that she doesn't have to worry over-much about money, but she doesn't own a condo with amazing furniture either. The in-betweens, the middle to lower middle class. This is a life I'm very very familiar with and it comforts me to see those familiar trappings in a written world. A written world with fantastic and mythic themes.
So I haven't really written anything about the plot or the storyline and I'm not gonna go into it at length (there's historical facts, eugenics, and the complexity of love and human interactions), but I just want to say that I'd love to read more novels like this.