Via Pop Matters:
Gina Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter is very much a mosaic. It’s a hazy fever-dream of a novel, a story in which the confusion of the narrator spills into the storyline itself, leaving the reader as disoriented as the protagonist. Given the serious thematic issues here, both political and personal, this confusion might be expected to result in a reading experience that’s more frustrating than satisfying. Happily, though, Apostol manages to keep her readers engaged, for the most part, by imbuing her story with significant event, as well as sentence-level interest.
As with many mosaic novels, a simple reiteration of the plot reduces the story to something unappealingly simplistic. A Filipina college student, a daughter of privilege, becomes involved with a group of would-be revolutionaries under the Marcos regime. They commit petty acts of rebellion before working their way toward a much larger, more significant event. Consequences from this range from the obvious to the unexpected.
And come see Gina read from Gun Dealers’ Daughter in San Francisco in October.
