A Review of Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing (Kokila, 2019).

[xiomara]

A Review of Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing (Kokila, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

 

 So, this novel, Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing, packs quite the powerful punch. Let’s let the official description give us some key details:

A powerful 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.

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.

SEE“A powerful 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. 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.”

Ribay is also the author of two other YA fictions but I have not yet had a chance to read them. As I have discovered, there are always more books to read =). In any case, so the description gets us to the point that Jay has traveled to the Philippines and looks to find out more details about Jun’s untimely death. While staying with Jun’s parents and two sisters, the letters that Jun had written to Jay are stolen. He immediately assumes it’s Jun’s father, Tito Maning, who has taken those letters, especially since Tito Maning doesn’t seem to want to discuss anything related to Jun. Eventually, Jay’s desire to find out more about Jun’s death leads to familial tension, and Jay is forced to leave early. He next visits his Titas (Chato and her partner Ines); once at their home, he finds a far more welcoming atmosphere and gains some leads related to Jun and the circumstances that might have lead up to his death. Over the course of the novel, Jay is also able to make some journalistic alliances (in part related to his connection to Jun’s sister Grace), which grant him yet more context behind Jun’s life and premature death. Ultimately the novel is a coming-of-age, one in which Jay comes to realize how important the Philippines is to his identity. What is perhaps especially important to this novel is Ribay’s awareness of Jay’s privilege: as a transnational subject, he is able to go on this quest with a kind of mobility that not all the characters in the novel can claim. In this sense, Ribay’s work reminds us of the limits of most fictional narratives (and so often specifically young adult novels), as they necessarily focus on individual trajectories and in this process, open up a larger world in which so much inequity exists. Ribay’s depiction of Duterte’s policies concerning the drug war, for instance, reveal how much latitude Jay does have. He gets to return to the United States and later tells his father that he wants to take a gap year and return to the Philippines. It is thus incredibly important that Ribay includes so many other characters, especially the journalists and activists who populate the back half of the text; they remind us that representational imaginaries are still tethered to a referential reality in which significant battles remain to be waged. Ribay’s work, given its strong emphasis on the power and potential of identification, can be paired alongside other texts that, for instance, are much more suspicious of these forms of fidelity. For instance, I immediately thought that Ribay’s novel would pair incredibly well with Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son. Both works involve protagonists of mixed-race Filipino descent but each protagonist has very different reactions and responses to identity and conceptions of the diaspora. Overall the book is a wonderful addition to the canon of Filipino/a/x American literatures, and I’m encouraged to go back through Ribay’s two previous novels.

For More on the Book Go Here:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602453/patron-saints-of-nothing-by-randy-ribay/9780525554912/

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at sohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu