Never Have I Ever

The stories in this collection were written over some time and show the development of a distinctive and exciting voice. The protagonists all exist within a more magical reality than our own but their personalities are diverse as individuals which frequently speak to modern concerns. I do not think that constructing a single consistent universe was an important part of the storytelling as much as drilling in to the feeling of what each situation was like for the characters. A spookiness can go away for a while in a tale but you become used to the sensation of it coming on with full force to drive the plot. At their best the characters are multilayered, frequently contradictory within themselves either in response to or generating directly the uncanny features of the story. As to the language, there are terms in Tagalog that not every reader will understand in each story, but those aren't obstacles to understanding the story itself, and can help immerse the reader in a rich, fully realized setting, I was not disappointed in the book even though I do not read a lot of horror.