Ask a Bookseller: ‘Everything We Never Had’ by Randy Ribay

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

All this month, Ask a Bookseller is focusing on great reads for kids and teens as they mark the start of the new school year.

September is also when the longlists for the National Book Awards come out, and this week’s recommendation from Grace Lane of Linden Tree Books in Los Altos, Cali., made that coveted list in the “Young People’s Literature” category.

Grace recommends the YA novel “Everything We Never Had” by Randy Ribay, about four generations of Filipino-American fathers and sons.

The book deftly moves among the points of view of each of the four generations when they are 16 years old and on the cusp of major decisions. We then get to see those 16-year-olds as fathers and occasionally grandfathers of the next generation.

The first generation is a Filipino immigrant to California in 1929, and his great-grandson lives in Philadelphia in 2020.

Lane calls the novel a “wonderful exploration of California history, of American history. And it really focuses on the Fil-Am experience in a way that I haven’t really seen done in any YA or middle-grade novel yet.”

For example, the novel includes the 1930 riots in Watsonville, Cali., marked by targeted violence against Filipino immigrant workers, which had a huge impact on the Filipino population in California.

Subsequent generations saw the end of the Marcos regime in the Philippines and the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020.

“It’s in many ways a really good treatise on transgenerational trauma, but it also really brings home that your story is also your ancestors’ story,” she said. “It’s also your parents’ stories. It’s everything that they wanted for you and everything that they didn’t get that they wanted to have when they were 16.”

The finalists for the National Book Award will be announced Oct. 1 with awards given Nov. 19.