Lysley Tenorio

"An undocumented Filipino teenager redefines his relationships with his mother, his culture, and the place he calls home"--

A Novel

The Son of Good Fortune

Nate

This is a book that moved me, as it is prevalent in my life and the lives of those I love in many ways, regarding the trials of citizenship in this country and the trials of being young and figuring out what you're made of.

Excel reads as someone lost and exhausted, just going about the motions and doing as much as he can while remaining hidden in plain sight as someone undocumented. Between the two timelines that this story primarily leaps between - the 9 months he spends in desert town Hello City and back at his mother's place in Colma, California - I really enjoyed witnessing how both experiences provide Excel with a newfound wisdom that allows him to examine his relationship with his mother, his unprocessed grief, and his own identity under a different, more matured lens.

joana ashley

Reading more Pilipino!

This is a book that moved me, as it is prevalent in my life and the lives of those I love in many ways, regarding the trials of citizenship in this country and the trials of being young and figuring out what you're made of.

Excel reads as someone lost and exhausted, just going about the motions and doing as much as he can while remaining hidden in plain sight as someone undocumented. Between the two timelines that this story primarily leaps between - the 9 months he spends in desert town Hello City and back at his mother's place in Colma, California - I really enjoyed witnessing how both experiences provide Excel with a newfound wisdom that allows him to examine his relationship with his mother, his unprocessed grief, and his own identity under a different, more matured lens.

Ali Angco

I always shy away from stories  from my own country. Even if it’s fiction—it’s flinching even though I enjoy reading other dramas from other countries. My own people, my own countryman’s suffering is something I can’t take lightly. I don’t find it entertaining. It’s good that I picked up this book without knowing what it’s about. It’s subject is uniquely a Filipino problem and an American one. It’s not easy to empathize with or draw experiences from. But shedding light onto this subject had made me realize what a piece of a document can dictate someone’s journey in life. 

jules

Samantha Glass

Kaycee

Angie Lee

A Recommended Book From: Refinery 29 * The Minneapolis Star-Tribune * Publishers Weekly * Baltimore Outloud * Omnivoracious From award-winning author Lysley Tenorio, comes a big hearted debut novel following an undocumented Filipino son as he navigates his relationship with his mother, an uncertain future, and the place he calls home Excel spends his days trying to seem like an unremarkable American teenager. When he’s not working at The Pie Who Loved Me (a spy-themed pizza shop) or passing the time with his girlfriend Sab (occasionally in one of their town’s seventeen cemeteries), he carefully avoids the spotlight. But Excel knows that his family is far from normal. His mother, Maxima, was once a Filipina B-movie action star who now makes her living scamming men online. The old man they live with is not his grandfather, but Maxima’s lifelong martial arts trainer. And years ago, on Excel’s tenth birthday, Maxima revealed a secret that he must keep forever. “We are ‘TNT’—tago ng tago,” she told him, “hiding and hiding.” Excel is undocumented—and one accidental slip could uproot his entire life. Casting aside the paranoia and secrecy of his childhood, Excel takes a leap, joining Sab on a journey south to a ramshackle desert town called Hello City. Populated by drifters, old hippies, and washed-up techies—and existing outside the normal constructs of American society—Hello City offers Excel a chance to forge his own path for the first time. But after so many years of trying to be invisible, who does he want to become? And is it possible to put down roots in a country that has always considered you an outsider? Thrumming with energy and at once critical and hopeful, The Son of Good Fortune is a luminous story of a mother and son testing the strength of their bond to their country—and to each other.

The Son of Good Fortune A Novel

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