Lorina Mapa

Lorina Mapa's wonderful graphic memoir gave me waves of nostalgia - we shared all the same eighties crushes and intense love of eighties music (how many times did my heart break listening to Tears for Fears album The Hurting? Too numerous to count). I feel this so strongly too: "There is a certain window in age (for me it was between 11 and 18) when your reaction to music is so powerful and pure that nothing you listen to afterwards can grab at your emotions in the same way." (page 63 ) show more Mapa's intensively personal recounting of the EDSA revolution in the Philippines - a bloodless revolution is fascinating and inspiring. show less

This memoir is about the childhood of a woman who grew up in an upper class, politically-connected family in the Philippines during the fall of the Marcos regime in the 1980s. As the title suggests, as a kid she was obsessed with English and American pop music. Being fairly close to her in age, I was into a lot of the same music and remember being mildly aware of the political developments in the Philippines. The 80s retro stuff is a fun way to offset the drier historical bits.

It was show more interesting to revisit the fall of Marcos from the perspective of someone closer to the events, but at the same time the author also seems distant from them, as she was just a child at the time, a child of privilege at that, who left the Philippines shortly after Ferdinand and Imelda did to live in North America and only tell this story decades later from Canada. (It reminds me of [b:Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63|29363260|Such a Lovely Little War Saigon 1961-63|Marcelino Truong|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1466632964s/29363260.jpg|49608682] in that way.)

Also, though it wasn't in the mission statement of this graphic memoir, it feels odd that no mention was made of the recent political developments in the Philippines, especially since they seem to contrast so starkly to the nature of the Philippine people as illustrated in this book. This is a good book, but I was hoping for more insight into a country I should know more about. show less