![]() ![]() Even though Paz does not take up that much space as the novel progresses, the invisible force of her character pulses throughout the rest of the novel and is indeed both structurally and thematically its linchpin, a figure who allows us to see people on two sides of the “immigrant experience”-those from poor working-class backgrounds and those from moneyed families. We learn later that this sentence introduces the story of Paz, the wife of protagonist Hero’s uncle Pol, from her early childhood in the Philippines to the moment she births her daughter, Roni, in America. The sentence also reads as a simple musing, a hypothetical that asks you, the reader, to mold yourself into another figure. The tone is quite casual, and the narrator feels close, sagacious, and hauntingly prophetic. In fact, we can begin with the novel’s first sentence: “So you’re a girl and you’re poor, but at least you’re light-skinned-that’ll save you.” ![]() ![]() Upon finishing Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, you will likely ask yourself, What makes this book so good? The answer: many things, reader. ![]()
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