America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE 'This book is one of the best debut novels (and novels, period) of recent years' Elle 'Blazingly fearless' Observer 'Radical... I was startled at how moved I was' Guardian

How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she's already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay in the Bay Area, knows not to ask about the first and second. And his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their daughter Roni asks Hero why her hands seem to scream with hurt at the steering wheel of the car she drives to collect her from school, and only Rosalyn, the fierce but open-hearted beautician, has any hope of bringing Hero back from the dead.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Book Club

416 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2018

About the author

Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of the University of California – Berkeley. America Is Not the Heart is her first novel.

Reviews

[Emily May · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave.

There's only one slightly disappointing thing about this book-- that the prologue introduces us to Paz and her compelling story, which completely drew me in, but then she fades into the background as a secondary character for the rest of the book. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Hero’s tale, but I never quite got over losing that connection with Paz.

That being said, this is a beautiful novel. Castillo writes about the Filipino migrant experience across three generations of women and she captures it, not through grand events, but through small details and poignant interactions between characters.

Hero de Vera arrives in California, having left her old life behind but still bearing its scars. Her uncle Pol has given her a second chance in the Bay Area, yet she must navigate this strange new world and the new relationships that come with it - most notably those with Pol's wife Paz, their daughter Roni, and new love Rosalyn.

As for loving America or not loving America, those aren’t your problems, either. Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.

It's a bit complex in parts, with jumps to two odd, but somehow fitting, second-person narratives, lots of untranslated Tagalog, Pangasinan and Ilocano, and flashbacks. But the characters are so vividly-drawn and the family saga so compelling to me that it was easy to persevere through some of Castillo's more dense and complicated narrative choices.

We've seen a lot of migrant fiction in the last couple of years, but America Is Not the Heart carves out its own unique place for itself. It is a quiet, carefully-crafted family saga, driven by its characters. It is a story of leaving places, but never quite leaving those places. And it is a beautiful queer romance. Personally, I knew nothing about the Philippines and its political history before reading this so it was an educational read, too.

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[Truce · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thing about growing up Filipino in America, and especially growing up Filipino in a heavily white area, and especially growing up Filipino in a family that doesn’t fully see you as Filipino and allow you access to your culture or a right to your heritage or the freedom to define yourself, is that certain things — what should be shared cultural experiences, memories, references — sometimes feel like they’re happening in a vacuum. You don’t really know if they’re shared, if you’re imagining things, if you’re crazy or sensitive, if maybe the microagressions are just happening in your head, if the weird things your family does are actually Filipino things or just weird things your family does.

Any review I could give of this would be too personal. It’s a slice-of-life story about a woman who was part of the anti-Marcos resistance and came to live with her uncle in Milpitas, CA after being released from a prison camp. The pacing is pretty slow and the language weaves in and out of Tagalog and Ilocano and some references in Pangasinan. People don’t really understand when second generation Filipinos say that they can understand the language but not speak it, and this book felt like home in that way — all of these other languages formed a single language that was spoken in all of our homes. I don’t know that non-Filipino readers would really get this. But it is beautifully and unapologetically Filipino, which I think American readers (Filipino or not) need to see — immigration and diaspora outside of the context of sacrifice, and outside of the “coming to America for a better life” narrative. It is also beautifully and unapologetically queer and just generally sexually liberated.

Reading and listening this book was so important to me. It wasn’t even about anything I have any remote experience with — Filipino immigrants in the Bay Area in the early 90s — but I felt like this book saw me and recognized me and told me I was part of this, a child of the diaspora, as much as anyone else.

[Meike · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had such high expectations for Castillo's debut, but alas, this wasn't for me: While the story itself, a tale about an immigrant family from the Philippines, could have been super interesting, the narrative sructure drove me crazy and I almost abandoned the book halfway through. The novel starts with Paz, a young nurse who marries into the powerful de Vera family and leaves the Philippines with her husband to make a life for herself in the U.S. Then, the narrative shifts to Hero de Vera, her husband's niece, who, years later, joins the couple in the States after being released from internment - although her rich and powerful family profited from the system, Hero had joined the resistance against Marcos and, after spending years with the rebel forces, got captured. She only survived because of her family name, but was swiftly disowned by her parents, consequently fleeing to her beloved uncle.

So we have two narrative strands that Castillo intertwines throughout the book: While time in the States progresses, we learn more about Hero's past through numerous flashbacks. For me, those scenes in the Philippines remained too superficial and I wanted to learn a lot more about life under Marcos. At the same time, we witness the Filipino immigrants in America doing the most mundane things in excruciating detail: Going to the hairdresser, hanging out in a restaurant and at a parking lot, and - again and again - eating. I get that food plays an important role here, but this was just too. much. eating. The whole pacing is just all over the place, especially the middle part of the book made me wonder where this meandering tale is going and why I should proceed.

Another important factor in the story is language. Castillo writes in English, obviously, but she sprinkles in three other languages spoken in the Philippines - sometimes she does explain the content, sometimes she doesn't. I wondered whether this would have bothered me if these were langauges that I understood or regional variations of my native language, and the answer is: Yes, it would have bothered me. It is just annoying to read over the course of 400 pages, especially as you get the point after 50 pages max.

And then there's the shifting focus to Hero's sexuality: She is queer, and Castillo talks about her sexual identity at length, first suggesting that this might be a problem within the immigrant community, and then suddenly it isn't. What exactly is the point of this part of the story? It's just another aspect that makes the book feel disparate.

So this clearly isn't my kind of writing, but to be fair, I think that people who have a higher tolerance for meandering narratives might enjoy this a lot more.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific debut...a tribute to the Filipinos in in the Bay Area.

Three generations of Filipino
immigrants make their way to the Bay Area from the Philippines, in the 1990’s.

It’s a wonderful multi generational story—with a full cast of sparkling characters...family drama—of trial and tribulations....
coming-of-age, love, sex, romance, bisexuality, friendships, community, work, foods, fashion, language dialects, (Tagalog), history, politics, social class, racism, and culture....

Past traumas from the Philippines affected the relationships here in America—the conflicts between the parents, relatives, and siblings, were complicated.

The stories in this book were remarkably enjoyable.
I’m sorry I had only recently learned about it.

All lives matter.
I love our Bay Area diversity....
Black lives, Vietnamese, Latino, Russian, Asian, or Pacific Islander, Indian, Native Americans, Filipino, and mixed...

In “America is Not the Heart”, the author did an outstanding job exposing the diverse identity perspectives...
with vibrant characters, and a look at the realities that divide us —
The prose is bold, sexy at times, and intimate.

Great storytelling... often hilarious - but also a look at the murky gray areas of race and family struggles.


4.5 rating

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great read about several Filipino women - one who supports her family as a nurse, returning to the Philippines at one point before marrying and moving to the United States. The focus eventually turns to Hero, who is a refugee after living as a political prisoner for ten years. She finds home and family in a Filipino community in California and even finds love. The end of the novel, in fact turns into a bit of a romance novel, and possibly the most realistic portrayal of a bisexual woman I have seen in fiction.

I learned a lot about Filipino languages, culture, and history that I didn't know before.

There are a lot of pop culture references inside the novel itself, much of them for Filipino movies, tv shows, and music. If you felt left out or uneducated, you can at least listen to the author's Spotify playlist for the novel.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Totally recognize the importance of this novel in its detailing of the Filipino diasporic experience through three generations of Filipina women. I was most impressed with the prologue written in second person and also appreciated the rich details related to family, sexuality, and migration. Unfortunately the structure of this novel just didn’t work for me; I found it hard to follow and stay engaged and that made me feel less connected to the characters. Glad it works for other people, though!

[Valerie Best · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, bear with me—which, by the way, would have been an appropriate subtitle for this book.

So, I liked this book. Sometimes an awful lot. There were moments in this book that took my breath away. Its writing is great, and got me excited about a kind of writing that I haven’t been very excited about for a while.

The story deals with the Filipino experience, and feels truly immersive. One of the book's most interesting aspects is its liberal use of differing dialects. The language is occasionally, though not always, translated, which creates a space between the story and some readers.

Which I like.

What’s most interesting, though, is that the three adults who live in the house all came to America from the Philippines as adults, but they each speak these three dialects to a greater or lesser degree. One, Paz doesn’t speak at all, one, Pol only speaks to Hero stiffly, and in certain contexts. One, Hero has nearly forgotten. The language excludes the reader from their world, but also, more intimately, the characters from each other.

There was also an enormous focus on food, which really worked for me. It wasn’t necessarily food I recognized, but it was really richly described and played a full, sensual role in the story, nearly a character itself.

However, this story meandered. I’m certain the slow unspooling was intentional, but knowing that didn’t make the story move any faster. There were moments that moved so slowly they bordered in excruciating. The story also leaves a lot of unanswered questions, which I also assume was deliberate, but, in such a long, slow-moving book, so many unresolved plot points felt a tad unnecessary.

This book is beautiful in many, many was. It moves slowly and deliberately, and simply assumes that you’ll figure out a way to contextualize what you don’t personally understand. It is opaque and challenging and truly beautiful.

“Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.” (30)

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

"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 felt when you were ten... You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness."

This truth, and others like it, forms the backbone of what could have been a very powerful debut novel. Sadly, there is so much adiposity loaded onto it that true form is lost. Just because a story is long overdue doesn't mean it needs to be overwritten. This is a 250-page novel stretched out to 406 lugubrious pages and was nearly my Tournament of Books Waterloo. Somehow, like Jonah from the whale, I made it out. Thank you, God. (And shame on yet another posse of "editors" and proofreaders who failed a talented newcomer.)

If there are five ways to say the same thing, Castillo will find them and join them with commas and semicolons. Again and again and again. When, during a conversation, a character mentions some of the Filipino food items they might whip up for dinner, we get a list of 13. Is someone considering which 1980s pop tune to play in their casette deck? Watch as they choose between 17 possibilities. It is as exhausting as it is unnecessary and asks too much of the reader. There were many moments that were interesting, and I learned things that were new to me, so I stuck it out (obviously) but - truth be told - it was not a wise investment of time.

This tale of an extended Filipino-American community in the Bay Area most definitely draws one into a world that is generally unknown to outsiders. Through my work, and because I live where I do, I was familiar with a lot of it already and welcomed this chance to revisit such an interesting culture. The portion of "America Is Not The Heart" which deals with this is outstanding. The sections which take place back in the Philipines are also clearly well-researched and solid, if rather lacking in depth or detail. What a shame these matters do not occupy a greater percentage of the book.

The novel as a whole is overburdened by far too much of Hero's and Rosalyn's complicated, messy, Top Secret Lesbian Nuk Nuk. Perhaps Castillo meant this to be bold and courageous - and I suppose it is avant-garde, given the 1976-1992 time frame and its placement in this particular ethnic community - but really their affair is just a bloated treatment of The Love Which Dare Not Stop Speaking Its Name. It does not advance the story much, and it doesn't actually lead to a greater understanding of the bigger picture Castillo is obviously trying to paint. And so it becomes an endless, sometimes seedy, distraction.

Combining the above two points (Castillo's logorrhea and her spotlight on girl-girl action) into one example, I offer you this:

"...it was difficult not to want it all the time. It was difficult for Hero to remember that she'd spent months and months filling up her days with something that wasn't fucking around with Rosalyn, that in fact she'd gone most of her life doing things that weren't fucking around with Rosalyn, that she had an entire lifetime's worth of evidence showing that it was possible to think about things that weren't fucking around with Rosalyn -- and yet."

(This seems like a good place to thank God again for His mercy. Thanks, Omnipotent One, for getting me through it all.)

Add to all this a few of my pet peeves (misspellings in the Age of SpellCheck which include "acetOminAphen" and "paraphernElia"; details of medical conditions which are inaccurate) and 3 stars is my minor concession to a promising writer who should be encouraged to find better mentors.

[jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you, like me, get frightened when you read a book described as a multigenerational novel, fear not, dear reader. this novel is squarely about our 30 something protagonist, hero, ex guerrilla fighter in the philippines, survivor of two years of torture at the hands of the marcos regime, now living in the california south bay with her uncle and aunt.

this book is a love story. there is love between two women one of whom is so hurt she doesn't want to get near anyone ever again. there is love in a community in which you can still drop by and people will always greet you warmly and sit you down to eat. there is love between uncle and niece, and there is tremendous love between cousins.

castillo takes us inside the filipino community of a small california town where people negotiate closeness through language (there are many languages in the philippines! they sound nothing like each other!) and food. some of the non-english language is untranslated. it's all good. we are not entitled to have everything served to us on an english silver platter. this is a big, big country. we are fine as long as we understand most of what the other says. as for the food, when i was a grad student someone asked me, somewhat disdainfully: "these unique cultures you guys talk about are like..... food?"

if you are in any doubt that food makes culture (what kind of food, how it's cooked, what we do with it, when we serve it, how we eat it, with whom we eat it) this book should lay all doubts to rest. and if you are a white american you should already know how meaningful food is. fast food joints are where kids meet, hang out, build themselves as members of a group, hook up, create themselves as future adults. i have a white midwestern friend who spends a lot of his time in spain. every time he comes back to the US the first place he goes to straight out of the airport is mcdonald's. they have mcdonald's in spain, of course, but you don't go to mcdonald's for the food.

i didn't know anything about the philippines' history before reading this book. omg this poor, poor people. brutalized by anyone who happened to drop by, including of course the americans. and now, as a character's young white schoolmate says, "filipinos are not real asians; they are more like mexicans."

in israel "filipina" has become a common word for at-home help -- of any nationality at all, including israeli.

let's read more of this country's amazing literature. let's read more literature from the downtrodden countries of the world -- the countries whose citizens come to the west to clean up our shit and dig in the dirt of our fields. let's read their precious and lovely literature and let's honor the humans who leave behind families, education, degrees and status to make a better life for their children.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fascinating for its depiction of Filipino immigrants’ lives in northern California, a refreshing immigrant perspective, sadly, the story falls gracelessly flat. Initially sucked in by Paz’s depiction of life in the Philippines as a poor young girl ignored by her family during martial law, Paz’s life gets even more interesting when she immigrates to northern California. She marries into a well-known upper crust Filipino family offering her husband-to-be, Pol De Vera, US citizenship and getting status in return. But 8% of the way into the novel, the story abruptly turns and a different De Vera, Hero, becomes the protagonist. This is too bad because Hero is not as likeable as Paz.

Like her uncle Pol, Hero was a surgeon in the Philippines. That is, until she joined The New People’s Army around 1990 and hid in the mountains with fellow soldiers. Caught and held in a camp for two years, her captors broke both of her thumbs, ending her doctor’s career. When they discovered she was a De Vera, who were friends with the Marcos family, she was released. At the same time, Marcos’ regime was being overthrown, so Pol invites Hero to California.

Castillo rambles on about every-day life for the Filipinos living in Malpitas, California. The writing is often confusing since she doesn’t use quotation marks. Some interesting things happen related to Hero’s sexuality, but for the most part, Castillo fails to make Hero’s life anything but ordinary. Perhaps it’s the overuse of details that pulls the story into the boring category. You have to read about a lot of food before the peak emotional moment of the scene is revealed. I wanted to like this book. It felt like it was going somewhere, but it never did.

[Trish (readtmc) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Personally, this book has qualities that make this an intimidating read:
- It’s been described as an “epic family saga” (too many characters)
- It’s 400+ pages (too many words)
- There are shifts in time periods and POVs (too confusing)

None of this mattered to me when I found this title floating around on bookstagram.

It didn’t take long to become absorbed into the lives of these fully-realized characters in Castillo’s impressive debut novel. They live in a world I’m familiar with (the languages, the food, the mannerisms, social dynamics, etc.) and yet, they are strangers with layered backstories that I’ve come to know personally with the turn of each page.

As a Filipina American, I am always searching for Fil-Am literature. Besides relating culturally, there’s a desire to learn more about Philippine history and question what has been told, especially the popular narrative of “We came to America for a better life.” Is it “better” to work 16 hour days to send money back home? Reading different perspectives shows the diversity of the “Filipinx-American experience” as well as enriches my own.

I should note that the character driven story may be considered “slow.” Hero’s everyday life in Milipitas is mundane. Or, some readers might feel slowed down by the intermittent use of languages, especially the different dialects. I don’t speak Tagalog, Pangasinan, or Ilocano, but the mix of languages, along with English, is an inherent part of the Filipino-American experience, which made these people and their world feel so real. These characters have lives beyond the book’s 400 pages and am left wondering how they’re doing today.

[Jaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m so conflicted about this book! After reading Mia Alver’s IN THE COUNTRY a few years ago I’ve been wanting to read more fiction about the Filipino diaspora so was thrilled to hear about AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART. The prologue pulled me in immediately and I ate it up. But I overinvested in Paz who then almost disappeared from the narrative once Hero, our true protagonist, arrived. Hero is an amazing character and the reveals about her life are handled masterfully but I experienced them at a remove. I spent 300 pages pining for Paz only to have a gorgeous queer romance sweep me up in its beauty. I’m so annoyed at myself for not recognising Paz as a gateway to Hero!

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5) This was criminally overlooked a few years ago. Set in the early 1990s in the Filipino immigrant neighborhoods of the Bay Area in California, it throws you into an unfamiliar culture at the deep end. There are lots of different ethnicities mentioned, and snippets of various languages (not just Tagalog, the one I knew of previously) run through the text, sometimes translated but often not. It’s a complex, confident debut novel that references episodes from the history of the Philippines of which I was mostly ignorant – genocide and reforms, dictatorship and a Marxist resistance.

Geronima is a family name for the De Veras; not many realize that Hero, in her mid-thirties and newly arrived in the USA as an undocumented immigrant, and her cousin Roni, her uncle Pol’s seven-year-old daughter, share the same first name. Hero is estranged from her wealthy parents: they were friendly with the Marcos clan, while she ran away to serve as a doctor in the New People’s Army for 10 years. We gradually learn that she was held in a prison camp for two years and subjected to painful interrogations. Still psychologically as well as physically marked by the torture, she is reluctant to trust anyone. She stays under the radar, just taking Roni to and from school and looking after her while her parents are at work.

When Roni’s mother Paz, a medical professional, turns to traditional practices for help with Roni’s extreme eczema, Hero takes Roni to the Boy’s BBQ & Grill / Mai’s Hair and Beauty complex to see Adela Cabugao, a Filipina faith healer. The restaurant becomes a refuge for Hero and Roni – a place where they hang out with Adela’s granddaughter, Rosalyn, and her friends in the long hours Paz is away at her hospital jobs, eating and watching videos or reading Asian comics. Over the next few years Rosalyn introduces Hero to American holidays and customs. Castillo is matter-of-fact about Hero’s hook-ups with guys and girls but never strident about a bisexuality label. Hero pursues sex but remains wary of romance.

The everydayness of life here – car rides, cassette tapes, job applications, foil trays of food – contrasts with too-climactic memories. Though the plot can meander, there’s forward motion in that Hero shifts from a survival mindset into an assurance of safety that allows her to start rebuilding her life. I loved the 1990s as a setting. The characters shine and the dialogue (not in speech marks) feels utterly authentic in this fresh immigration story. My only minor disappointment was that second-person narration does not recur beyond a chapter about Paz and one about Rosalyn. The title riffs on a classic of Filipino American literature, America Is in the Heart (1946) by Carlos Bulosan, though I didn’t explore that comparison; it’s a novel that opens up real Google wormholes, should you take up the challenge. Castillo’s vibrant, distinctive voice reminded me of authors from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Viet Thanh Nguyen. Please tell me she has another book in the works.

Favorite line: “Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave.”

Words about the heart:

“Hero had no truck with people for whom the heart was a dreamt-up thing, held together by divine saliva, a place where gods of love still made their beds. A heart was something you could buy on the street, six to a skewer … served with garlicky rice and atsuete oil.”

“Hero had never even felt ambivalence toward Pol … She’d only ever known what it felt like to love him, to keep the minor altar of admiration for him in her heart well cleaned, its flowers rotless and blooming. What she hadn’t known was that her love was a room, cavernous, and hate could enter there, too; curl up in the same bed, blanketed and sleep-warm.”

“May tinik sa puso. You know what that means? Like she has a fishbone in the heart. She’s angry about something.”


Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this TOB contender to be a bit of a slog. Initially I was trying to look up all the foreign words (in 3 different languages) and going back and forth between the hardcover and the audio but about a third of the way in I abandoned that and just went with the audio. I didn't understand everything but I got the gist of it.

The last quarter of the novel was more interesting than the first 3/4 which I can sum up for you here....food, food, food, footwear, faith healing, sex, sex, sex, superstitions surrounding death. I found the sections about Hero's stint in the NPA the most fascinating since I know zip about the Philippines during the time when Marcos declared martial law but regrettably Castillo wrote very little about this and focuses more on present day.

This is a lot of book that says very little....I wish I had watched the Golden Globes tonight instead.

[Justine (Milkz) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“As for loving America or not loving America, those aren’t your problems, either. Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.”

I can only describe this as a beautiful ode to Filipinos everywhere. This book is outside my genre (fantasy), but it felt like a fantasy while reading because I was in such disbelief over seeing “Filipino” and “tsinelas” and other Filipino dishes besides adobo in a book that I purchased at an actual bookstore.

Paz’ prologue is a perfect introduction into the Filipino lifestyle and mindset. From the opening lines we see how light skin is more valued than dark skin and how blood is important despite not fully knowing each member of your family. We are introduced to a culture of many different dialects that are often times mixed together with English when spoken. We see how becoming a nurse helps to bring people over to the states, and we see how some Filipinos become overqualified for their work positions in America because their Philippine credentials don’t carry over. From the introduction we see the pride in their identity that Filipinos are known for, and we see how love isn’t always about emotions and grand gestures. Sometimes it’s about giving your loved ones opportunities to survive in the society they are a part of.

Despite the lengthy introduction that left me wanting to know how Paz fares in America , the rest of the story is actually told through the eyes of her husband’s niece, Geronimo de Vera or “Hero” for short. In the Philippines, Hero was a doctor who joined the New People’s Army in rebellion against the Marcos regime. At one point her unit was captured, but she was let go once it was revealed that her family was related to Marcos. Because of conflicting political views, Hero was exiled from her family and was sent to live with her uncle in the States.

I very much appreciate how the author doesn’t showcase the “ideal” Filipino and instead illustrates characters who do not fit the usual Filipino mold. Paz and her husband, Pol, were not exactly in love when they decided to get married. They are also poor because only one of them brings in any income due to Pol’s doctor credentials not crossing over to the States. The other main woman are also not the “ideal” exotic, demure, and light-skinned woman that society seems to find attractive. Hero has a strong accent, casually talks about sex, is bisexual, and has disabled hands. Rosalyn is an outspoken hair stylist discovering and exploring her sexuality. Hero’s niece Roni, is a rebellious child with eczema. They don’t fit Filipino ideals, but they are also immigrants who don’t fit the American ideal. Throughout the story, we sense that everyone is trying to figure out where they belong. These characters also don’t go on an epic adventure. They showcase the lives of many people who lived in Milpitas during the 90’s, that is, the lives of people who live in a suburban area where the minority is the majority and English isn’t the prevalent language.

It’s also interesting to note the history between the U.S. and the Philippines interwoven in America is Not the Heart because rather than mentioning how the U.S. helped the Philippines, it highlights the racism Americans had towards Filipinos. Many times the U.S. is known as the Philippines’ “big brother”, but this book points out how Filipinos were once, and sometimes still, thought of as dirty and prone to sickness. I wonder if Castillo chose to write these parts of our history to point out that though Asians are known as the “model minority,” we are not always respected.

Reading this was such an experience. I am Filipino, but all my life I’ve been surrounded by people of the majority. In grade school, I was 1 of 2 Filipinos in my class, and I learned that being Filipino wasn’t going to help me succeed in America. I feel like I sometimes use a public persona that is “okay” in public and keep my Filipino heritage for when I’m with my family. This “switch” used to make me feel like I wasn’t truly Filipino, and like the opening quote of this review mentions, my parents showed they loved me by giving me opportunities to survive in America so they didn’t teach me their dialects, and they didn’t force me to interact with people of my ethnicity.

Like the characters in America is Not the Heart, I’ve felt like I wasn’t really Filipino but I also wasn’t really American. I didn’t fully embrace being Filipino or even feel comfortable surrounded by other Filipinos until after high school. It’s taken me awhile to love my culture, but I can now definitely say I have the Filipino pride that we are known for, and I now fully embrace being Filipino-American.

This was my first experience with Filipinos in literature, and it’s left me feeling wonderfully empowered! I am now eager to get my hands on more books like this one!

[Megan]

I liked this so very much.

This is a slow-moving, character-driven story. At its core are three prickly, difficult women (and a prickly, difficult, wonderful little girl), but the story belongs to Hero. After a decade as a field doctor with the New People's Army and then two years being tortured in a prison camp, Hero is adrift in America in the early 1990s, living with her uncle, his wife, and their seven-year-old daughter, Roni. Their family is complicated, and Hero's own history is complicated enough that she doesn't see it as a continuous life, or herself as a continuous person. Until she does, eventually, once she falls into friendships. Her relationship with Roni, with the other adults in the family, all shift. She falls in love.

Castillo makes some interesting choices in how to tell this story. The first thing is that she starts the book with a second-person prologue from the POV of Paz, Hero's aunt, before shifting the focus to almost exclusively Hero's point of view. While I can understand a reader imprinting and feeling disappointed that the rest of the story doesn't belong to Paz, I thought this made for an interesting reading experience. Hero sees Paz as closed-off and untouchable, but the reader gets to carry with them all the secrets and vulnerabilities learned about Paz in that prologue. I liked that. (There is another section of the book, much later, told from the second-person by Rosalyn, and I also really enjoyed that. I dearly love a dramatic voice, though, which might account for why I especially loved the writing in these second-person sections.)

Another interesting facet of Castillo's storytelling is that passages about Hero's life with the NPA are not comprehensive. They're not told linearly. They are mostly about the relationships and emotional reality of those years. And, really, the story of Hero in California is also really just about the relationships and the emotional reality of what Hero's self-recovery, self-discovery looks like. A thousand high-fives to Castillo for not just not-ignoring sexuality as part of the fabric of Hero's character (or Paz's, for that matter) but for featuring it. Her sexuality, her relationship to it, her relationship to her orgasms ffs, are part of her emotional reality, and that's so amazing to see in litfic: sex that actually does heavy-lifting for character-development and relationship-building.

What else? I liked the hesitant, stilted style the writing sometimes broke down into: not quite fragmentary, but sentences broken into two when they shouldn't have been. I loved Roni so much. In the final pages, where she's writing a book report about a made-up book, to spite the teacher who underestimates her, I laughed out loud. I loved how the idea of home was constantly in motion, being challenged and being remade anew. I liked that the title is the clue to how to frame the narrative from a readerly perspective. I descend from a different branch of the Filipino diaspora than the one featured here, but I enjoyed and could relate hard to the food stuff in this book--it was a crime just how hungry this book made me. I also liked that the book often used Tagalog, Ilocano, and Pangasinan without constantly explaining itself to the reader. I know, like, three phrases in Tagalog tops (thanks to Spanish loanwords), but I found that anything essential was explained or clued in through context. I understand that other readers find this frustrating, though, and I definitely don't recommend this book to readers who need to know every word or phrase before moving on.

And because there's no suggestion of this in the book's blurb, here's a content warning for childhood sexual abuse: Hero heavily suspects two male cousins of sexually abusing or attempting to sexually abuse Roni. Roni's reaction to them makes it clear she's afraid of them, and what Hero witnesses suggests that her fears are warranted. This is not portrayed explicitly on page, is not lingered over or a major part of the book, but the way Roni may not be protected by anyone other than Hero--Hero tries to tell Roni's mother, but it's not clear whether she fully understands--is upsetting.

[Thor Balanon · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness." 🔹America is Not the Heart is our collective longing: a mixtape of our youth, a recipe of our cravings, a scar, a reminder. An ache. (Thanks, Bennard @bcfajardo ) With a Prologue that reads like a precise, stylish short story—which I have personally read three times—the novel unfolds deliberately. Domestic details, road trips, tropical maladies, and a budding romance weave in and out of a surfacing, volatile memory. Castillo's prose is beautiful and powerful, with surprising metaphors that show her sheer joy of writing. It also feels wonderful to read Filipino and Ilocano (my native tongue) in a novel that is published internationally. Without italics. Comfortable and rhythmic between English words. Nakakaiyak. America is not the heart but you know what is? This book. With all its aches and longing and uncertainties and pride. And pancit. 🇵🇭

[Chaitra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I almost didn’t finish this book, but no one else at my library wanted it. I was able to keep it forever. Then I felt bullied into reading the thing because I’d kept it forever. It’s slow. It has very weird sentence structure - no quotes, which I can deal with, and periods where they’re not required, which drove me borderline crazy.

What I think is really bad about the book is that it starts with Paz. Paz is a Pangasinan, a second daughter who isn’t as pretty as the first and therefore ignored, but who determinedly makes a life for herself. Not just that, she marries into an upper crust family, becomes a citizen of the US, and brings her husband there. She works two jobs, and has all these different claims on her money because there are so many people dependent on her, but she doesn’t resent it. If anything, she actually enjoys it, because now she’s the one who is needed.

But 30 pages down the line, we begin to follow Hero, Paz’s niece by marriage, who lands in California because she’s trying to get away from her past. Hero used to be a field doctor in a terrorist group opposing the Marcos. She was caught and was in a prison camp for two years before her family name caught the attention of people, and she was released. So now, she’s trying to forget, I think. Hero’s journey takes up most of the book and it’s not even close to the quality that Paz’s story possessed.

It’s not just that Hero is almost intensely dislikable. She is also very opaque. I knew her sexual preferences and proclivities in a detail that I didn’t particularly want to know, but I had no idea why she joined the group of revolutionaries. What brought her around to the idea that the Marcos regime were thugs? This was important - she’s privileged. Her family were friends with all the big names. She never showed any political awareness prior to joining the group. So, why? I didn’t know this simple thing about her and that made her unrelatable in addition to dislikable.

What also is the point about her cousin Roni and the deal with her karaoke hatred and hatred of her male cousins? The implication is that they abused her in some way, but it never went anywhere meaningful. Why did Pol suddenly decide to get out of the US, after struggling for years to be there? He’s unhappy but he’s been unhappy for a long time. There’s nothing in the man’s character that suggested he would do what he did. Why did Rosalyn and Jaime break up? It’s hinted that they have a heavy history but it’s never mentioned why they separated. Well. It’s a fragmented book with a lot of threads, some of which are very worthy. But the problem is that it spends its time focusing on things I didn’t want it to focus on. Hero’s sexuality wasn’t something I cared about in the grand scheme of things. And there wasn’t even conflict - her sexuality doesn’t particularly affect her relationships. There are a few people who stop talking to them, but Hero never mentions if she was hurt by any of it. Rosalyn, yes. But this wasn’t Rosalyn’s book - more’s the pity.

[H.A. Leuschel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book where I learned so much ... about the Philippines, its many languages, its complicated history, the people who are portrayed in such an endearing and complex way, their difficult or traumatic past, their amazing cuisine (which I'd love to get a taste of now!!), the strong family and community bonds, living with bisexuality and how difficult it is to emigrate, miss home as much as learn to find a new one.

The author's writing style was rich and multilayered because sometimes you get a translation for a foreign expression or sentence, sometimes you do not and it felt authentic. Through that linguistic puzzle, I got a sense of how important the bond with a mother tongue is or in the case of Filipinos often they have many different tongues depending on which area in the Philippines they are from. Her characters are beautifully drawn and I was often gripped by the narrative!

[Andy Lillich · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to admit, right up-front, that it took me awhile to really connect with this story. After all, what did I know about the Philipines? Absolutely nothing. Which meant that much of what I read in the beautifully told prologue and even the first several sections of Hero's story, felt like it went right by me. I had no knowledge of the places, customs - and especially the many passages in Filipino dialects (of which there many) and had trouble connecting with the story.

Once the story shifted to California, however, I began to realize that CONNECTION, indeed, was what this book is all about - once I began connecting with Hero as person as she began the slow and painful process of CONNECTING to the people (family AND community) and places she had been forced to immigrate to.

And it is that emotional connection to main character Hero and to the people and places that she connects to that caused me to fall in love with this story and - most especially with - the beauty of Elaine Castillo's writing.

I feel I learned SO MUCH from this book, about another America that exists in the country I love and also live in, but most of all, I enjoyed falling in love with these characters.

I cannot praise this novel highly enough. Please, PLEASE - do not miss this one, dear Reader Friends!

[ns510 · Rating 3 out of 5]

”The gift of the small world was that it was small. The curse of the small world was that it was small.”

📖 A multigenerational family saga // So much to admire about this sprawling, multigenerational story encompassing life in Phillipines around a period of communist uprising in the country and onwards to Filipino American immigrant life in American suburbia. It all comes out via a handful of central characters; two separate Filipino immigrant families living in America, and a young female relative of one of the families who later joins them in America. The author is meticulous in documenting the everyday lives of these characters, depicting the nuances of life as Filipino immigrants in America, and to a lesser extent, that of life in the Phillipines amidst the communist uprising against the government. I appreciated the various dialects of the Filipino language introduced into the text, and the sharing of unique cultural practices and expectations not just within Filipino culture, but also specifically within the cultural identity of Filipino Americans.

Unfortunately, this narrative style also made for dense, slow reading, at least for me. With these stories, I need to be fully immersed and unfortunately wasn’t as invested in the characters as I would have liked. I would have liked to know more about certain characters as well. I contemplated abandoning this midway through but persevered, and enjoyed it more towards the last quarter. I enjoyed the interactions between Paz and Hero, the dynamics between members of the De Vera family, and wished there had been more of that. Liked it, but didn’t love it and felt the story could have been more evenly balanced.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are many descriptors one could use for this expansive novel; not all of them would entice a reader, but Castillo's debut was so blindingly beautiful and dauntless, that I would encourage you to read it even though it may at times be slow to read, use sporadic second person, or be structurally uneven. I loved all these qualities about it, especially in tandem with the elements of its character depth, subtly interwoven historical commentary, discerning cultural perspective, and all-encompassing humanity.

Castillo is an immersive storyteller. She's not going to lay everything out for you about Filipinx culture in both the Philippines or Milpitas, California (her two settings); she's going to drop you right in there, have her characters talking to each other in Ilocano or Tagalog (which makes you realize, oh, there are MANY regional languages in the Philippines, and also me realizing, due to the Spanish colonization of the country, that I recognized some of the latin-rooted words #learningthrufiction). She's not going to translate for you, but you'll get it. Or you won't—that's okay!

She's going to mention former Philippine president slash dictator Ferdinand Marcos, but only with the word Marcos. She's not going to give you a history lesson, she's going to show you how dictatorship and martial law affected her characters and their decisions. You'll come to understand how the opposing party operated, the underground rebellion in the mountains, called the New People's Army.


She's not going to have her bisexual protagonist grapple in first-person with her bisexuality; she's just going to show you what it is to be Hero: a woman who's lived three lives by age 35 and feels attracted to people regardless of how they identify. She's not grappling with who she's attracted to, she's grappling with her very identity formed and affected by how she grew up, what she decided to do in retaliation to that, and where her rebelliousness landed her: living, post-trauma, with extended family in the Bay Area.

And the majority of the novel takes place in 1991, so you'll also read a little about Terminator 2.

The storytelling is bold and brash, but I would be remiss not to mention the compassion. I came to love these characters—the complicated thoughts of Hero, the stoic, hardworking Paz, and Hero's namesake and eight-year-old cousin Rino. Hero and Rino (both named Geronima) form the most tender relationship over the course of this book, and Rino may be one of the best depictions of a kid I've encountered in literature.

I read all 408 pages of this book, learned so much, and I know there is still much to be gleaned that I probably missed. And I still want to know more.

Castillo is doing what Junot Diaz's writing did with Yunior for the Dominican diaspora. I'd argue she does it better than the Pulitzer winner, though (lo siento, pero), Castillo manages to soak you in the lives of more than one protagonist—render fully a community of Filipinx characters, and takes particular care with the women. She tackles so much in one book, and I applaud her for it, though others may feel it's too much. Castillo: take up your space, say your piece, I am HERE for it.

America is Not the Heart charts a complex journey for the reader, one that is particularly rewarding. I encourage the curious reader, the one who remembers to laugh amid tragedy, the reader who is open to the grand and minutiae, a reader who doesn't prize sentimentality, the reader who would like perspectives of those we rarely see in fiction. The immense talent and unique voice of Elaine Castillo's debut novel awaits you.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book! What a triumph. It was a bit too long but I never wanted it to end. The prologue, Ga-li-la, is exceptionally powerful...it makes you want to stay with Paz, but we spend most of the novel with Hero, who is a little inscrutable....Roni, however, is the most lively, realistic child in fiction I've read in a while. Rosalyn is sparkling and endearing...other characters, like Jaime, or Pol, or Adela, leap off the page. This is a huge, big-hearted epic novel with a scope and size to parallel Marquez or the big, bolshy male Americans- I mean the Franzens and Eugenides and Updikes. But this is a love letter to Filipino identity, Filipino language, this is a paean to outsiders and the traumatised, to the cut-off and the disenfranchised, to families that have fallen out and to communities formed through economic hardship or floes of migration. Elaine Castillo is a novelist of tremendous empathy and talent. And this is such a special novel. How often do you read a book with an all-Filipino cast of characters, focused on a lesbian love story that is tender, lovely, evolves so slowly and delicately and without condescension? This book is one of a kind and will make all the waves this year, and it fully deserves it.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

There have been many excellent novels about the immigrant experience in America. But I feel like the richly detailed and engrossing story of “America Is Not the Heart” by Elaine Castillo shows a really unique point of view I've not read about before. The story primarily revolves around Geronima De Vera who is nicknamed Hero when she arrives in America from the Philippines. She goes to live with her aunt, uncle and feisty young cousin Roni in Milpitas (a suburb outside San Jose, California) where she primarily helps looks after the 7 year old girl. As an illegal immigrant she’s not able to seek out work despite being a trained doctor back in the Philippines. Even if she had papers to find employment she’d have to retrain in medicine as her uncle has painfully discovered. Though he was a highly respected surgeon in the Philippines he can only find low-paid manual work in America. Hero has gone through many difficult experiences to arrive here and the novel slowly discloses the complexity of her life over the course of the novel, but it integrates this so gracefully into accounts of Hero’s day-to-day life in this Filipino-American community and her relationship with a woman she meets there named Rosalyn. Of course Hero’s life has been shaped by her heritage, but the story doesn’t hang on the question of national identity as much as how she’s constantly evolving as an individual.

Read my full review of America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo on LonesomeReader

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Castillo immerses readers in her story of a Filipino family living in Milpitas, California in the 1990s, with reachback to the Philippines. She makes some risky choices, including leaving lots of phrases untranslated, but on the whole, it works, partly because of the confidence and energy of her prose. I love these characters, their relationships and backstories, and enjoyed the time I spent with them.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written novel with compelling characters. I found myself pausing as I neared the end because I didn't want to finish with these people. I'm ashamed by how little I knew about the Philippines before reading this novel.

[Imi · Rating 4 out of 5]

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...

In a similar way, I loved the beautiful descriptions of food throughout and that also helps immerse you in the culture; pretty much everything was completely unrecognisable to me, but Castillo wonderfully manages to present not just the food itself, but its importance to the characters. Above all, I loved that Castillo managed to show that the experience of a Filipino-American is not a single, standard experience; there are variations in the community from the regional and ethnic, to the linguistic and cultural.

I don't want to say too much about the protagonist Hero's own experience, because that would lead to unnecessary spoilers, but it is definitely one that is particularly unique. Castillo covers a lot of material here, from the frightening and brutal Filipino history, to the experience of undocumented immigrants in America, and so much more that I don't want to give away. Recommended, even with the lull in the middle, because this feels unlike anything else I've ever read and I definitely feel it taught me a lot.

[Cherisa B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lot of books in one. It's the story of an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines and her integration into the Filipino community in Malapitas, CA outside San Jose. It's the story of bisexual and gay women of color, refreshingly not a coming out story or the struggle of it but just the is-ness of it in their being-ness. It's a story of survival and identity, how the political is personal, how to take all the pieces of you and hold them together to make and remake a life you can live.

Castillo flavors the story with a lot of Filipino words and phrases from many dialects (there are several hundred) because almost everyone in the story comes from different areas and lingual backgrounds and most times more than one. This served to give the reader an experience the people in the story must have felt at times - confusion, frustration, resignation, so much to learn and know and understand that you might never be able to. I really liked this aspect of the story even though I expected there to be perhaps a glossary at the end to help, which there wasn't, thus forcing the reader to accept the experience.

Another nice aspect is the insight into the immigrant experience across the generations - older couples who have lived and worked and raised families, some children born in the islands and others in the States, what their ethics are of supporting each other and those they've left behind.

Castillo gives us a well-drawn group of characters and interesting issues to consider. She is Filipina American as am I, and much of it felt very authentic.

[Candace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in the unglamorous cities of San Francisco's East Bay, "America Is Not The Heart" follows Filipino immigrants as they dig in and take their place in their new country. It's the 1980s, and Paz uses her training as a nurse to leverage an escape from the poor rural Philippines. Her surgeon husband comes from a rich, corrupt family, but when he joins her in Milpitas, he becomes a security guard. They offer sanctuary to his niece, Hero, who has been rejected by her family after joining a revolutionary group as a doctor. She has been captured and tortured, and released suddenly with her thumbs broken and mind battered.

Hero's job is to help with Paz and Pol's daughter Roni, because the two of them work all hours of the day and night. With Roni, Hero begins to build relationships in her new world among East Bay Filipinos and Mexicans. Hero makes friends and ventures out. She loves to have sex with both men and women, but women are her favorites. How will that play in this conservative community?

"America Is Not The Heart" is fresh and compelling--why aren't there more novels about the Filipino experience?--and I would give it five stars except for the irritating amount of Tagalog and regional Philippine dialects that are poured into the text with no explanation. Since I read an e-review copy (thanks, Viking!) there may be a glossary in the hard copy, but most readers would be flipping back and forth so much that their reading pleasure would be badly compromised.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic novel about a family of Filipino Americans living in Milpitas, CA. I didn't want my time with these characters to end. Loved the second person pov spotlight chapters of supporting (but very compelling) characters; loved the use of various Philippine language slang words sprinkled throughout the dialogue. I knew very little about the culture and history of the Philippines before reading this and so I enjoyed learning more about it. Grateful to the Tournament of Books for putting this book on my radar.