America Is Not the Heart

You already know that the first thing that makes you foreign to a place is to be born poor in it; you don't need to emigrate to America to feel what you already felt when you were ten, looking up at the rickety concrete roof above your head [...] You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.

3.5 stars rounded up? Stunning beginning and end, but the middle dragged a little for me; there was just a little too much sex and partying for my personal tastes, and I found that fairly repetitive. That's my one complaint though, and really the rest of the book blew me away.

The story centres on a Filipino community in California. Castillo uses a fantastic mix of English with untranslated words from the many Filipino languages (Tagalog, Pangasinan, Ilocano...). I loved this aspect of the novel, as it's the provides a wonderful sense of authenticity and the reader is instantly involved in the culture. It was fascinating how even members of the same community cannot communicate with each other in their own native languages, as they're all so different. This was emphasised with character of Roni, who is a 7 year old girl born to a Pangasinan mother and a Ilocano father in California:

It felt like Roni didn't really know the difference between Tagalog and Pangasinan, and moved between the two interchangeably as if they were one language. Nobody had told her otherwise, Hero supposed. But for Hero, listening to the mixture was like listening to a radio whose transmission would occasionally short out; she'd get half a sentence, then nothing—eventually the intelligible parts would start back up...