Bookbed reviews: ‘Sula’s Voyage’ by Catherine Torres (plus a giveaway!)

by Allana Luta

The book I finished before Sula’s Voyage was Eugene Y. Evasco’s Anina ng mga Alon, which I had bought at the 2015 Manila International Book Fair but decided to read only now. It was about Anina, a young Badjao, growing up in a society that does not completely understand or accept her people’s culture.

I had no idea what Catherine Torres’ story was about so you can imagine my surprise when another book with a similar theme was delivered to my hands just a couple of weeks after I read Anina. The universe is confusing but sometimes it compels you to read certain books at certain times and you realize later why that is.

THE STORY

Fifteen-year-old Sula has always known she is different. Even though her parents have shown her nothing but love and acceptance, she sees her dark skin as a reminder of how she doesn’t fit in with the rest of her family.

What’s worse is she also feels that her parents are hiding something from her. After getting expelled from school, Sula reluctantly goes to stay with her mother’s friends. There she unexpectedly finds herself on a journey of self-discovery — a journey that keeps drawing her to the sea. Sula must not only figure our her parents’ secret, but also just how different, and possibly magical, she really is.

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WHAT I LIKED

Taken as a whole, Sula’s Voyage is at once an intimate story of a young girl discovering herself and a story of social issues usually pushed to the background. I love books that are about “the bigger picture” but are pegged as, say, a love story. In this case, Catherine Torres skillfully shows us a part of the Filipino culture that is not necessarily mainstream or the usual metro city experience through a modern Filipino teen’s point of view.

The story was written in a way that Sula’s real identity was kept unknown until the very end, which made me read the book uncharacteristically fast for a sloth reader. I also liked how Torres used actual local places. She didn’t use vague terms like a small town in an unnamed province. There were real locations which made imagining the environment a lot easier.

HOWEVER…

I guess my only complaint is that (Spoiler alert! Highlight succeeding text to read.) when the truth about Sula was finally revealed, the events happened rather quickly towards the end of the book. The fantastical elements of Sula’s story wasn’t explored as much as I had hoped for.

Also there was this one teeny, tiny typo which I hope they fixed in later prints. It was supposed to be Pablo but they printed Pedro. Anyway!

tl;dr

All in all, I thought this book was great. The storytelling was good and it (subtly) tackled issues beyond the usual young adult themes of romance and self-discovery. I wish there was a Filipino translation of this just to see if the narration flows differently when written in the local language. I’ve said before that I don’t really read books written in Filipino but I’m willing to read Sula’s Voyage again in Tagalog.

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