After her plans for the future are disrupted by an unexpected breakup, Benni Manlapaz, born and raised in northern Ontario, seeks escape from her everyday routine by visiting her father in the Philippines – the fantastical land of ghosts and glamour that her parents described to her as a child.
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What:Shade (Inanna Publications, 2016)Who:Mia Herrera is a twenty-seven-year-old author whose writing has appeared in publications like CG Magazine, Live in Limbo, Side Street Review, Hart House Review, and TOK: Writing the New Toronto. She’s a recipient of the Tatamagouche Centre’s Youth Scholarship Award and Writers’ Trust Fund Scholarship.Why you need to read this now:After her plans for the future are disrupted by an unexpected breakup, Benni Manlapaz, born and raised in northern Ontario, seeks escape from her everyday routine by visiting her father in the Philippines – the fantastical land of ghosts and glamour that her parents described to her as a child.At the last minute, Benni’s mother joins her on her trip, and the two travel together, staying with wealthy members of her mother’s family in the upscale neighbourhood of Forbes Park. Benni quickly becomes immersed in the lavish lifestyle of her relatives. Canada, in comparison, is a bleak world of work, work, and more work, and Benni cannot understand why her parents ever left.Through her travels, Benni becomes acquainted with her long-lost relatives and visits the various sites the Philippines has to offer. Her stay is full of adventure, including trips to private islands, wild nights out that end with embarrassing paparazzi encounters, and moments of epiphany and danger. As Benni’s trip progresses, she is confronted with the choice between what she believes to be an easy and spacious life in the Philippines versus going back to her drab routine in Canada.However, Benni eventually finds much more than she bargained for: she discovers a world of poverty that supports the rich and the social restrictions that even the rich experience; she learns to value the honest, human relationships that come from seeking and reconnecting with family; and she comes to understand the importance of the stories we tell ourselves to construct and maintain our identity.Shade is especially telling in its address of immigration and of growing up as a person of Asian descent in North American society. It traverses the plains of what it means for many to be an Asian American – forever at odds with oneself, with the land of one’s past, and the land of one’s present. It poignantly portrays what it means to search for a home, either in longing for a distant land or in desperately seeking fulfillment in a new world.Shade further dissects the silences that often occur between generations, sharing the perspective from an authentic and believable voice that is both convincing and engaging.Shade is one of those books that should be read in Asian American and Canadian literature courses. It addresses a gap in the growing collection of this genre by telling a contemporary tale from a distinctly Canadian point of view.X plus Y equals:Shade includes inter-generational and cultural explorations found in Deanna Fei’s A Thread of Sky, paired with the humorous glitzy, glamorous and over-the-top drama of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians.
* * *Thank you to Inanna Publications, especially Renee Knapp, for sharing this timely novel with us. If you love discovering new authors, check out our previous First Fiction Friday picks.
