Reviews for In the Country: Stories

by Mia Alvar

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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.


Library Journal
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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.


Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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.


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*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