Draft:La Tercera (novel)

La Tercera is a Filipino-American novel by Gina Apostol published in May 2023. It was Apostol's fifth publication.

Synopsis
When Rosario Delgado, a Filipina novelist in New York City, finds out that her mother has passed away in the Philippines, she delays going back home by devoting herself to researching her family's past and her mother's purported legacy, La Tercera, a location that may or may not exist. Rosario archives generations of family bequests and debris, from family notebooks and press clippings to rusted chicken coop remnants and maps of unclear purpose, as she attempts to comprehend her mother's past and her own. She also struggles with less obvious legacy, such as the lingering impacts of 50 years of American domination, Filipino puns and jabs that capitalize on the shifting overlays of language (English, Tagalog, Waray, and Spanish), and the sensitivities of successive generations of Delgados, a blend of despair and pride, venom and humor — "the wit of the hunted."

Rosario seems to find herself asking more questions as she goes along, and every life she discovers appears to lead to a plethora of other lives. But as the search for La Tercera becomes increasingly labyrinthine, Rosario’s mother emerges in all her dizzying complexity—victor and victim, rebel and traitor, the one who abandons and the one who loves. Concurrently, an other story emerges, composed of shards from the nation's obliterated past of oppression and carnage at the hands of US occupation troops.

Reviews
British novelist Hari Kunzru describes the novel as ""a whirlwind of narrative, which deploys all the linguistic and cultural resources at Apostol’s disposal to tell the story of Adina, Rosario and their ancestors. It is, at times, frankly bewildering to someone who doesn’t share all those languages, who doesn’t know the songs, the history, the taste and texture of local foods. It is hard to read a book studded with so many words I don’t recognize, or to have to stop and look up crucial references. And this, of course, is the point.""