Review: Smaller and Smaller Circles

Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This review is also found on Goodreads! :)
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Borrowing from the vocabulary of the great Stephen King, unputdownable.

This book provides a more than your raw and gritty crime fiction. This provides a shrewd look into institutions--both in our criminal justice system and in the Roman Catholic Church. It is laced in politics and for the first time in a long while, I didn't mind. In hindsight, I realized that you really couldn't write about Manila without getting political. This book served like a slap in the face of our political system and even the piousness of the Church. It's a juicy and interesting take on Philippine politics set in a whodunit. It's layered and multi-faceted. It gives the readers a glimpse at the affluence of the rich marred with corruption, and a jarring picture of poverty deeply rooted in even more corruption and social diseases.

It is so refreshing to read something that is set in a location I am fully familiar with. I could empathize with Father Lucero's frustration in EDSA traffic. I could almost smell the monstrous dump of Payatas. I could almost hear and smell the rain during the monsoon. The book is heavily laced with Pinoy culture with and it made reading through this a breeze. The pancit canton, carinderia, pollution and flooded roads--everything felt so eerily familiar and solid. So this is how it feels reading about your own home.. Location isn't just what I loved about this. The setting would not matter if the story is vapid and a barely-passable standard for a Wattpad flick. (Still hasn't gotten over my aversion-to-romance-novels phase.) I love crime fiction. I'm no expert on it, but the feeling of reading one is addictive. The suspense, the intrigue, the gore and the horror. And Smaller and Smaller Circles isn't just an okay story. It's raw and well-thought out. The characters are spot-on and people I can easily point out on a normal day walking in Manila. They are realistic and so, jarring in their possibilities.

Another thing I loved about this book is how flawlessly integrated the Filipino humor is on such a serious book. It was dead-on (forgive the pun) and I found myself laughing at even the smallest interactions. It shines a light at how Filipino humor is a form of resilience in surviving shock.

At the start, I had a hunch who did it. But how the mystery and twists unfurled was so enjoyable that it kept me at the edge of my seat. It was one of the best crime fictions I've read in a while. No wonder why this was also the fastest I've read in a long while.

Definitely my best read of the year.

This book is far, far from the shallow "stories" that often dominates the local bookstore's best sellers list. You know, the vlogger's bound compilation of beauty picture vaguely passing as "books"; badly proofread anthology of mundane and inane shallowness of "instapoets"; a compilation poorly-worded love advice from hypocritical bible-thumping celebrities. Those kinds of stories.

I hope to see more of Batacan’s whodunits in the shelves in the very near future. I wish to see more Filipino authors like her conquer the shelves of our bookstores and conquer both local and international bestseller lists.

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"The Church in this great Catholic country of ours is the last great, unexamined mystery. And I think you know what happens when you don't let the sunlight into dark places." - Director Lastimosa, Smaller and Smaller Circles

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