What a title! So true but so dark, Powerful stuff!

There are a lot of things I liked about this because it felt like life: hurried and abrupt and tough. You just never know what's going to happen! These characters were really well developed and I was surprised by the book's contents and happenings. The titular moment brought it all together. Mothers and daughters and families and angst.

I'm kind of depressed now but I liked it.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

The life of a Filipino family changes after they migrate to the US. Relatable family with emotional inadequacies, work vs. education, self growth/coming of age, abuse and beauty, women and culture, race and expectations, family, love, money, marriage, resentment and poverty. Repetitious towards the end about her mother and feeling unwanted, her parents’ age gap. The mass attention given to someone in the hospital felt unearned because I only felt distance in the relationships throughout prior. The plot towards the end also felt circular, like we were going nowhere. Which maybe is the point of the h’s life but it was taxing to read. When a new relationship comes out of the of the blue towards the end it’s like…. I would have liked if this was introduced earlier. Overall, still an authentic and grounded depiction of migrant children and their families. The ignorance, the stress of navigating life with messy humans who never learned how to be good parents, reinforcing trauma. The disillusion, the uncertainty, and defining what it means to be a woman. It all felt very real and honest.

*Thank you C.L. Sy and Penguin Group Dutton for the, Love Can't Feed You ARC.

Where do I begin? Oh: I LOVE IT.

The main character Queenie was named after Queen Elizabeth because her mom used to be so taken with Princess Diana. She's also a Chinese-Filipino eldest daughter to parents who resent each other. She, little seventeen-year-old girl, is being put in the middle of their squabbles. She did not want this. She did not ask for this. But both parents whether they're aware of it or not are battling it out with her smack-dab in the middle of the crossfire.

In between the story's linear progress, we are given vignettes from Queenie's memories, all of them stitching the book together in a way that felt supple, satisfying. Not a single space in this novel is wasted. I think this is a mark of good storytelling.

In the vignettes, we understand the characters even further, and in its linear timeline, we are wrenched bodily alongside Queenie as she experiences her life as a young immigrant. She befriends new people, works as a caregiver, have crushes, have crisis after crisis after crisis. And what's even better: these characters she encounters have rich, full lives as well. None of them are perfect and all of them are portrayed exactly as messed up as they feel.
- Yan and his closed-off-ness, his selective honesty and vulnerability, his "sluttiness" as Queenie had pegged
- her Papa and his incendiary rage which is sparked by the gasoline of his traditionalist upbringing and all the skewed beliefs he'd carried with him throughout his life
- her Ma and her burning resentment towards Papa, and by extension towards Queenie as well for being the supposed curse-ender who just ended up being a curse
- Junior and the way he tries to hold on to his youth, the way he's learning that he needs to grow up as quickly as his Ate
- even the side characters Flor, Tita Cynthia, Lucia, Ms. B., Zeus, Masha--see, I can even name them all off the top of my head as if they were my neighbors. Even the characters whose lives Queenie recalled from her memories, the girl who slit her wrists after
They all feel real to me. That's another mark of good storytelling.

My amazement is not just bias--understand, you can give me a book about Filipinos that doesn't pander to foreign eyes and i am immediately in love--it's also plain FACT. This is a good novel through and through. Like the main character in this novel, I'm also a US immigrant, and an eldest daughter, and although the similarities stop there, I felt deeply immersed in this main character's story. My family and I waited more than ten years (TEN YEARS!!!) to legally immigrate in the US, and every bit of the process chipped away certain parts of myself that I'll never get back for better or worse, but I've heard of stories like this one in which people who clung to less legal ways to haul themselves out of their state of life in the countries they've left behind, and this is not just limited to those from the Philippines.

There's a long history of colonization and exploitation that comes with telling stories of my homeland, and I'm so so glad to see that sprinkled throughout the entire novel as well. The cultural landscape of the Philippines which extends to the cultural landscape we each bring with us as we move to other countries is teeming with a long hard-earned resilience (which is forced upon us). There's also that long line of generational trauma that each eldest daughter has to bear and later conquer. We all move forward regardless. That all shows in this book. I think that's another mark of good storytelling.

<i>Massive thanks to Penguin Group Dutton and NetGalley for giving me advanced access to this title!! I'm SO excited for its official release. </i>


note for the publisher about myself:
My primary audience is both Goodreads in which my public profile has 101 friends/followers and counting and where I've also published over 122 reviews. My secondary audience is my queer discord reading club which is comprised of 112+ members and another primarily sapphic reading club which is comprised of 80+ members.