Printz Award winner and National Book Award finalist Randy Ribay (Patron Saints of Nothing) intimately explores how to balance familial expectations with an evolving sense of self in Everything We Never Had, a novel told from the perspectives of four generations of Filipino American men.
Ribay opens his fifth YA work with 16-year-old Enzo Maghabol's great-grandfather, Francisco, in 1929 California. Francisco, a recent Filipino emigrant, is regretful and lonely, working as an agricultural laborer in the U.S., expected to send his meager wages back home to his family. The time then switches to 2020 Philadelphia and Enzo's point of view--Enzo's family invites his grandfather, Emil, and Emil's dog, Thor, to move in with them at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Neither Enzo nor his dad, Chris, particularly like Lolo Emil, a man who "despises what he can't control." But Emil eventually agrees to let Enzo accompany him and Thor on evening walks and opens up "night by night and block by block."
The narrative fluidly shifts between Francisco, Emil, Chris, and Enzo's young adult experiences, and Ribay enriches each young man's story with actual history, like California's Watsonville Riots and the 1965-1986 dictatorship of Filipino Ferdinand Marcos. Each of Ribay's beautifully rendered yet imperfect characters grapples with "utang na loob," a Filipino concept of an eternal "debt from within"; Enzo describes it as "the glue of community, the weight of obligation," and each successive generation feels its weight. Fans of Abdi Nazemian's Only This Beautiful Moment should appreciate Ribay's profound multigenerational storytelling. --Kieran Slattery, freelance reviewer, teacher, co-creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms