Customer Reviews

Flipping

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There is a lot of sex, which will certainly appall some (but probably not those whose eyes are drawn to the hot Filipino on the cover!). The narrator's voice is so compelling that it's hard not to believe that it's autobiographical, but such a person probably wouldn't write, and Felipe is probably closer to what the author is really like. Or maybe Bantugan? If you can suspend judgement about the first narrator and deal with explicit sex, this is a very funny and ultimately moving first novel.

The first narrator and main character is a Flip queen with some very backward notions about racial hierarchies. So backward that many readers may be to appalled to read on and see how he develops. Besides being VERY graphic he (and the book) are often very funny. For open-minded adults!

There is A LOT of male-male sex in this novel, much of it exuberant, some of it submerged by jockeying for power in relationships with the dominant (white) race in America. More than the very explicit sex, what is likely to shock is the portrait of a Filipino American's eroticization of white men and prejudices against non-white men. The main character works through some stuff about self-image and racial domination, though he doesn't know that what he's doing. There are also some fantastic developments in the islands of his ancestors. END

I like the fairy tales after each of the contemporary narrator's reflections on their sexual pasts. There is A LOT of sex in all four parts but it really does reveal the characters and their development.