A review by lmsmango
Manila Noir by Jessica Hagedorn

2.0

A collection with more misses than hits. Each of the stories are engaging in their own right, though fall short of actually articulating the brutality of the region. Only "A Human Right" and "The Professor's Wife" seem to establish—and execute—this atmosphere well. Majority of the stories hinge less on the power relations that propagate these conditions, framing the conflicts as individual character shortcomings—a fundamental flaw in a genre where setting and atmosphere should take precedence. Instead many of the stories rely, or even indulge, on brutalizing its characters as some form of narrative compensation.

At the very least, the stories stop short of being overtly cruel. There's that!

2.5/5