 Sean Myers | Welcome to the Weekend Picks for May 16th! We welcome back Oakland University teacher candidate Sean Myers who highlights Asian-American Pacific Islander history month with Randy Ribay's historical YA fiction Everything We Never Had. Many thanks again to Sean for this awesome May Weekend Pick. To remind readers, Sean Myers is an English for Language Arts Education Graduate student at Oakland University. He is currently preparing to go into his final student placement and his student teaching, with hopes to be teaching high school English soon! |
Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay
 Randy Ribay | Everything We Never Had, written by Randy Ribay, follows the stories of the Maghabol family, and intertwines historical fiction with real questions on identity and the relationships between a father and a son. The story is told in generational pieces, leaving the readers to connect the dots. We hear from great-Lolo (Grandfather) Francisco’s perspective in the 1930 Watsonville riots, Lolo Emil who kept busy trying to make a living with his father’s flaky appearances as a labor organizer in the 1960’s, dad Chris’s experience with his overbearing father and his desire to study Filipino history in the 1980’s, and anxious Enzo who is feeling the pressure to bond in the 2020 pandemic. Hearing every man’s teenage experience, we get to see how each apple falls from the tree, and how one way of parenting doesn’t always result in the healthiest bonds between family. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lolo Emil, Chris, and Enzo are all stuck under the same roof. As Emil and Enzo begin to bond, we start to see how each man’s perspective in life is based in their own experiences and drawing the line between the four generations. Each of the novel’s perspective grapples with embracing ethnicity vs. nationality, masculinity, and living up to societal expectations. |
| This book coincidently lines up with Asian-American Pacific Islander history month, and I could think of no better way to teach such landmark moments in Filipino history, something I was very unfamiliar with before I started this novel. This read lead me to learn history that was entirely skipped over in my education, and I am so thankful to this novel for highlighting another minority perspective. Everything We Never Had, as well as other short stories and novels in Ribay’s catalogue highlight Filipino perspectives, again broadening libraries’ potential to support and represent students and readers of a similar background. Everything We Never Had has won numerous awards such as: Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature, 2025 International Literacy Association Notable Books for a Global Society, and Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APLA)-Literature Award. Ribay is also the author of titles such as: The Patron Saint of Nothing and The Reckoning of Roku: Chronicles of The Avatar. |  |
As always: #ReadBannedBooks and #CelebrateLove
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