In the country Stories

Review by New York Times Review

BELIEVER: My Forty Years in Politics, by David Axelrod. (Penguin, $18.) Axelrod, apolitical strategist and longtime senior adviser to President Obama (he proposed the "Yes We Can" motto that rallied scores of supporters), recounts in this memoir his lifelong enthusiasm for politics and appreciation for "the combat, camaraderie and satisfaction of . . . spending myself in a worthy cause." THE WHITES, by Richard Price. (Picador/Holt, $16.) Sgt. Billy Graves is the head of the Night Watch team in Manhattan when a crime in Penn Station is linked to the case that nearly ruined his career years earlier. Price, a master of the crime genre, has written "a work of reportage as much as . . . a work of fiction," Michael Connelly said here, that "provides insight and knowledge, both rare qualities in the killing fields of the crime novel." OVERBOOKED: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, by Elizabeth Becker. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) From the 1950s onward, political détente and the decreasing cost of overseas travel have made far-flung destinations accessible for growing numbers of people. Becker delves into how this multibillion-dollar industry has transformed global economies and landscapes alike. THE UNFORTUNATE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY, by Amanda Filipacchi. (Norton, $15.95.) Two women at the heart of Filipacchi's novel refashion themselves to overcome romantic handicaps caused by appearance. Barb, whose gorgeousness may have driven one of her friends to commit suicide, wears a homemade fat suit to ward off superficial admirers focused on her looks. Lily, devastatingly plain, fears she will be overlooked by men and composes a song that makes her irresistible to all who hear it. WATER TO THE ANGELS: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles, by Les Standiford. (Ecco/Harper-Collins, $16.99.) Sensing the profound risk of a water shortage in the region, Mulholland set out in 1907 to bring water from the Sierra Nevada to Los Angeles, a civil engineering project that allowed the city to grow into a sprawling metropolis. (When Mulholland arrived there in the 1870s, Los Angeles was a small town of roughly 9,000 people.) IN THE COUNTRY: Stories, by Mia Alvar. (Vintage, $16.95.) Alvar's debut collection ranges across the Filipino diaspora, with stops in the Persian Gulf and "Manilachusetts" in the United States. The title story, a tragic novella-length narrative, unfolds amid the political turmoil of 1970s Manila, when Milagros, a Filipino nurse, organizes a workers' strike to protest unfair pay. THE OPPOSITE OF SPOILED: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money, by Ron Lieber. (Harper, $15.99.) The "Your Money" columnist for the Business Day section of The Times offers pragmatic advice for including children in household discussions about money, budgets and privilege. Frank conversations about finances don't have to be thorny.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 28, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In these rich, layered short stories, Alvar gives voice to the immigrant experience of Filipinos. Living in Boston or New York City, the emigrants are still deeply tied to their native country, religiously sending back money and, in some cases, supporting whole villages as they toil in low-wage jobs and long for home. Hoping to ease his mother's burden, a man smuggles pain-killing drugs from his pharmacy in New York and brings them to Manila for his dying, abusive father, but what he learns about his mother's devotion upends his world. A special-education teacher living in Bahrain is paid handsomely to tutor a severely disabled young girl but soon realizes that her true mission is to deceive the student's mother about her child's bright future. In the title novella, a journalist and a nurse meet during a labor strike in Manila and marry, committing themselves to a life of activism only to discover that the country they've dedicated themselves to gave them everything and then took it away. These stories are stunning in their insight, compelling for their precise and nuanced detail, and provocative for the way they blur class lines.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this stunning debut collection, the yearnings of the characters resonate well beyond the page, and each story feels as rich, as deep, and as crafted as a novel. Equally impressive is the confident fluidity with which Alvar moves from Manila to Bahrain to Tokyo, from 1971 to 1986 to the 21st century. In "The Kontrabida," Steve, a pharmacist in New York, returns home to the Philippines to visit his dying father with a highly regulated sedative to ease his father's pain and, more so, his mother's. Although his risky action creates tension, a deeper strain arises when he attempts to help out in his mother's store and realizes he can't follow even the simplest requests: "It was a way of shopping I had completely forgotten: egg by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next." In "The Miracle Worker," Sally is a Filipina who's accompanied her engineer husband to Bahrain and, making use of her skills as a special-education teacher, takes on a single student, a disabled girl from a very wealthy family, whose mother is rich enough to think she can "buy reality." Throughout Alvar's stories, the language is as elegant as it is durable, while the lines of class, race, gender, and history are both blurred and crystallized. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Few writers, even the most seasoned, can produce collections of evenly superb stories. Alvar triumphs on her first try. Her nine stories reflect her own peripatetic background (Manila born, Bahrain/New York raised, Harvard/Columbia educated), featuring a cast of immigrants, expats, travelers, runaways, and returnees caught in constant motion-geographically, socioeconomically, politically, emotionally-as they search for respite and long for an elusive "home." A pharmacist returns to Manila with pain-relieving drugs for his once abusive, now-dying father and watches his mother continue to serve his every need. The appearance-and disappearance-of a glamorous young maid causes resonating distrust among Bahrain's Filipino expat community. An office cleaner rushes to the World Trade Center on 9/11, seeking her lover. A young writer is born, if only to keep her overseas brother alive forever. A middle-aged politician exiled to -"Manilachusetts" trains for the Boston marathon. The titular final piece imbues the phrase "in the country" with tragic meaning as a nurse and a journalist struggle to survive the violent tumult of 1970s Philippines. VERDICT Both intrepid readers and armchair tourists eager to explore debut narratives that straddle multiple countries and cultures-à la Violet Kupersmith's The Frangipani Hotel or Rajesh Parameswaran's I Am an Executioner-will be opulently rewarded here.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In this debut collection, Filipino students, teachers, activists, maids, and chauffeurs negotiate their lives under martial law at home and seek fortune abroad in the Middle East and New York. Each of these nine revelatory stories delivers characters who are equal parts endearing and disturbing. In the stunning "Esmeralda," a cleaning woman ponders her station in life as she dusts offices in the twin towers in the months preceding 9/11. "You lay thereEsmeralda, daughter of the dirt, born to toil in God's name till your hands or heart gave outreclining like an infant or a queen, a hundred levels aboveground." In "A Contract Overseas," a budding fiction writer in the Philippines reveres her older brother despite his immoral, often dangerous behavior in Saudi Arabia. "I could picture him, reading my words somewhere, chuckling at my attempts to save some version of his life. Who could say, then, that I had an altogether lousy or inadequate imagination?" In the chilling "The Miracle Worker," a special education teacher befriends her student's family's maidwho, it turns out, has a dark side. "I had underestimated her: what looked like a lifetime of toil and taking orders had contained subversions that no one, until now, had seen." Alvar deftly flips the master-servant dynamic on its head. Her electric prose probes the tension between social classes, particularly in "Shadow Families," in which wealthy Filipina housewives in Bahrain throw parties for working-class Filipinos. "These katulonghelpers,' as we called themwere often younger but always aging faster than we were, over brooms and basins, their lungs fried with bleach and petroleum vapors.Helping these helpers, who'd traveled even farther, felt like home." A triumphant, singular collection deserving of every accolade it will likely receive. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Shadow Families Every weekend, in Bahrain in the 1980s, we took turns throwing a party. Luz Salonga hosted the first one that September of '86, and as always, we crowded into her kitchen to help. Rowena Cruz soaked rice noodles at the sink. Dulce deLumen made spring roll skins from scratch, painting batter onto the pan with a brush. Rosario Ledesma threaded sweet pork onto thin bamboo sticks. Over the clatter of dishes and the crackle of oil and the smells of vinegar, soy sauce, garlic and fermented fish sauce settling on our clothes and skin, we laughed about children and gossiped about marriage, the noise as much a comfort to us as the food itself. Soon our teenagers would come downstairs, whining of boredom. We lent them the car keys and sent them off to the shopping mall for an hour or two. They'd return with rented Betamax tapes and watch them upstairs: episodes of Top of the Pops , movies that the Ministry of Culture had cleaned up beforehand. (There was no lobster dinner in Flashdance , so far as our teens knew; no montage of oily limbs in leotards.) Flor Bautista's son Joseph had hair on his chin already; Fe Zaldivar's daughter Mary was starting to fill out her blouses. We felt we could do worse than raise them on this small Islamic desert island, where some women veiled from head to toe, where cleavage and crotches were blurry bands onscreen. Meanwhile the babies, as we'd forever call our younger children, tore through the house with their dolls and robots, trucks and ponies. Our "Catholic accidents," Rita Espiritu liked to say--she was the vulgar one. We'd given birth to them here on the island, in our late thirties and early forties. The teens, who acted more like junior aunts and uncles to them than older siblings, had helped us name them: Jason and Vanessa, Stephanie and Bruce, names they'd accuse us of mispronouncing almost as soon as they could speak. Our babies learned math from Irish nuns and played soccer with Bahraini children and changed their accents at will. "Watch her bob that head from side to side like a Bumbai ," said Paz Evora of her daughter Ashley, whose best friends at school were Indians. At noon and sundown, when the muezzin 's voice piped from the mosques, our babies ran to the windows. Allahu akbar! they sang, as if they knew what it meant. As for our husbands, they retreated to a room where smoking was allowed and, implicitly, women and children were not. They turned on the television and spread the Sports pages of the Manama Times between them. A horse track in Riffa held races every week, but gambling there was haraam , of course. And so our husbands made their secret bets indoors, on the same notepads where we wrote the grocery lists. Now and then a great male chorus erupted from the den, hooting at wins, groaning at losses, ribbing one another for bad calls. They waxed authoritative about odds and breeds, trifectas and photo finishes. For speed and grace, said Domingo Cruz, no horse could match the white Arabian stallion whose genetics had not changed in 4,000 years. Efren Espiritu talked up the sleeper potential of mixed breeds, which combined their parents' best traits and evolved out of their worst. This was our husbands' surging, primal release from the neckties and briefcases and paper-stacked desks that bound them through the week. The wagers, the beer and the sizzling pork bits they ate with their fingers broke just about every law sacred to their Arab superiors. Men who'd seemed pummeled into defeat by the office, us wives, "bills to pay and mouths to feed," relatives back home in the Philippines who took them for millionaires; men from whom we looked away in embarrassment on weeknights, when they sat on the sofa picking trouser-sock lint from between their toes; these same men became brash and young again, every Thursday afternoon in their improvised gambling dens. In the evening we came together to eat and to sing into the Minus One, a double-cassette stereo system that let us dial down a song's vocal track and step in for Tony Bennett or Stevie Wonder. Holding printed lyric booklets (this was before karaoke gave us words on a screen), we crooned into the microphone: "Feelings," "My Way," "Three Times a Lady." Sometimes Vilma Bustamante's husband changed the lyrics to suit the occasion and Xeroxed them for all to follow. "Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)" became "Manama (Is Good Enough for Me)," to welcome a family who'd just arrived on the island. "I Made It Through the Rain" became "I Made It Through Bahrain," for a family on its way elsewhere. Outside the walls of Luz Salonga's house, beyond the fence around her yard, past her street and the gate to our compound, lay the oil fields and refinery that employed most of our husbands. We lived and worked in Bahrain at the pleasure of a people who mystified us. Everything we knew about the Arabs one day could be voided by what we learned the next. Luz Salonga, the most religious one of us, admired their devotion. "I see them kneeling by the highway at all times of day," she said, "while I can barely sell the kids on bedtime prayers." But the Arabs that Fe Zaldivar knew only worshipped sports cars and gold jewelry, mansions and shopping trips to London. To Dulce deLumen, who worked in an emergency room, Arab meant incompetent and backward. "The best of their doctors couldn't heal a paper cut," she said. But Rosario Ledesma didn't think a country could get this rich, and have all of Asia at its feet, without some special brand of intelligence . Every morning Vilma Bustamante passed their marble palaces in Saar. Every afternoon Paz Evora drove by crumbling concrete villages in A'ali. It didn't matter that our own community had its kings and hobos, geniuses and fools, heathens and believers; this didn't keep us from wanting a more perfect knowledge of our hosts, a clearer definition. We'd arrived on their island like the itinerant father in the fairy tale about a beauty and a beast, our houses fully furnished by some unseen master. Would he reveal himself to be a prince or monster? We decided early to behave ourselves rather than find out. In their shops and on their streets, we wore hems no higher than the knee, sleeves no shorter than the elbow, necklines that would please a nun. We lived like villagers at the foot of a volcano, hoping never to offend the gods who governed our harvest and our wealth. Excerpted from In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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