Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - Smaller and Smaller Circles

Reviews tagging 'Police brutality'

Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan

6 reviews

dlrosebyh's review

dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Filipino men are either of the two Ts: trash or treasure. And while this is cliché, Filipinos take this very seriously, hence why Smaller and Smaller Circles didn’t feel fiction at all while reading this.

If you’re familiar with Philippines politics, every element in the novel shouldn’t surprise you. Yup, priests can be corrupt, can be evil, and it happens more regularly than expected. But what’s so groundbreaking about this book is that it breaks the conservatism of our country in some sort of way.

Growing up as a Filipino in a conservative Catholic household, I've always been told to not do certain things, and consuming media against the 5th commandment (AKA: thou shalt not kill) is extremely prohibited. Smaller and Smaller Circles winning as a Philippine National Book Award sure stirred a lot of conversation, but it was deserving of the attention.

One thing Filipino authors never fail to do is to bring up the social issues in our country. In this book, we can see that with the underlying child labor plot, where children are forced to work because they’re in poverty.

While, yes, I know that the book is something not new or has been done before, I also really enjoyed reading it. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m Filipino, but this book felt somehow like home. It was easy to read, to digest, and you don’t need a lot of brainpowers unlike a majority of crime/mystery novels.

Overall, I believe that Smaller and Smaller Circles might be cliché, but it’s an eye-opening novel about the things happening in the Philippines, a third-world country who do not have the privileges first-world & second-world countries have.

Content Warnings

asti_64's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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helliepad's review

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adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

The author mentioned that she wrote this book feeling angry at the justice system and corruptness present in all Philippine bureaucratic and civil systems. I can feel it, and I can understand it.

What's worse is that though this book was written in the 90s, edited in 2013, and I've read it in 2022, this could have very well been a contemporary novel still set in my current time, or perhaps even in my grandchildren's time. It is the first time I've seen priests being involved investigators in crime novels instead of just witnesses.

Every single character in this book is dealing with decades of moral muck and personal issues and I don't have any poetic words for it. This is a situation that happens every day and I'm too familiar with the helpless, bleak feeling of the Philippines' extrajudicial system to even be surprised at it.

Very honest portrait.

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