Love Can't Feed You
A Novel
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A beautiful, tender yet searing debut novel about intergenerational fractures and coming of age, following a young woman who immigrates to the United States from the Philippines and finds herself adrift between familial expectations and her own burning desires
Love Can't Feed You is a stunning, heartbreaking, and compressed look at coming of age, shifting notions of home, and the disintegration of the American dream. It asks us: What does it mean to be of multiple cultures without a road map for how to belong?
After a harrowing flight, Queenie, her younger brother, and their elderly Chinese father arrive in the United States from the Philippines. They’re here to finally reunite with Queenie’s Filipina mother, who has been working as a nurse in Brooklyn for the past few years—building a life that everyone hopes will set them up for better prospects. But her mother is not the same woman she was in the Philippines: Something in her face is different, almost hardened, and she seems so American already.
Queenie, on the cusp of adulthood, has big dreams of attending college, of spending her days immersed in the pages of books. But there is not enough money for her and her brother to both be in school, so first she must work. Queenie rotates through jobs and settles, tentatively, into her new life, but her brother begins to withdraw and act out, and her father’s anger swells. As the pressures of assimilation compound, and the fissures within her family deepen into fractures, Queenie is left suspended between two countries, two identities, and two parents.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Filipino family forges a new life and uneasy reunion in Sy's astonishing debut. Queenie, the 17-year-old narrator, arrives in New York City from the Philippines with her father to live with her mother, Mel, a nurse who came to the country five years earlier. The bookish and observant Queenie is quickly disenchanted by America: their Brooklyn building is grimy and graffiti-ridden, and she barely recognizes Mel, who was once earthy and nurturing and now wears heavy makeup and prizes money above all else. To make matters worse, Queenie's dream of attending college is waylaid when Mel informs her she must work as a nurse's aide for Ms. Flor, the wealthy Filipina American woman who paid for Mel's nursing education. Silence casts a pall over the home ("words of endearment fester in our throats and render us incapable of saying anything") as her father struggles with Mel's closely guarded independence and her role as the breadwinner while he toils as a part-time janitor. The plot ramps up after Mel encourages Queenie to consider a romance with Ms. Flor's grandson and she loses her virginity to him. Sy skillfully lays bare Queenie's wide-ranging emotions, from rage to sadness, and reveals the nuances of the family members' relationships. Rich details of Filipino culture such as folk stories and religious iconography are interwoven with gritty depictions of the compromises made by the immigrant characters, some of whom work in seedy massage parlors. It's a knockout.
