REVIEW: Iris After The Incident by Mina V. Esguerra
Dear Mina V. Esguerra,
My friend Kat from Book Thingo recommended this book to me. It has a somewhat unusual premise that got my attention: Both the heroine and hero are hiding/recovering from a sex scandal. In Iris’s case, a sex tape she made with her now-ex-boyfriend got out by accident and now everyone with an internet connection and the interest to look (not even very hard) knows what she looks like naked and having sex. She’s a young woman in the Philippines and her family are horrified. It put her job at a not-for-profit foundation which funds scholarships for women in STEM fields at risk. She had to move out of home. She barely has a relationship with her parents anymore and what there is is stilted and awkward. Her brother, Liam, and she still get along but as he lives at home with their parents it is difficult to connect.
Iris moved into a small apartment in NV Park in Manila. She has been keeping herself to herself for nearly two years. She’s had counselling (she still has counselling) and is starting to feel like she could tackle life in the “new normal”. Her employer has stuck by her and she’s even starting to make friends in the complex.
Then she gets stuck in a lift with a handsome young man one night and other parts of her awaken again. They don’t introduce themselves by name initially. It is made clear that this man also has a scandal in his past. They are “9M” and “9J” for a little while. There is clear attraction and after a little while they decide to confess to each other their names, knowing full well that it’s only a Google search away for all their secrets to be known.
The young man is Gio Mello. I won’t go into what his scandal is because it takes some time for the details to be revealed and I don’t want to spoil it. But suffice to say that it is a sex scandal of a different flavour. It happened but there were some extenuating circumstances which mean he’s still in the “good guy” category.
Gio is only a year out from his scandal. He still doesn’t have a cell phone. His strategy for dealing with things is to ignore it and hide away from any notifications or mentions. Iris, on the other hand, searches all of her mentions out. For her knowledge is power and for him ignorance is bliss.
Because of their unique circumstances, Iris and Gio understand what the other has been through and is going through and, is perhaps more forgiving than someone without a sex scandal blowing up on the internet in their past. There is more to them than that however. It is a thing they have in common but also, they enjoy each other’s company and have a strong physical chemistry.
This book is hotter than Learning To Fall – which surprised me but I don’t exactly know why. I guess I thought Learning to Fall was your regular heat level (it has on page sex but it’s not particularly explicit). It’s good to know that you change it up depending on the story and that you can write more explicitly (not that Iris After The Incident falls into the erotic category, it doesn’t) and it works.
I found the book very easy to read and I liked both Iris and Gio very much. Although, as the story is told entirely from Iris’s POV, Gio was at times a little opaque. There were times when I didn’t quite understand the subtext of conversations. There wasn’t quite enough on page for me to understand what the characters meant by certain things they said, even while it was obvious there was something I was missing. That might say more about the way I read and process information I guess.
In Iris’s job she reviews applications for scholarships from young women who have to answer questions in 500 words or less. The book uses this device to reveal some things about Iris and her history as she imagines herself being asked to write her answer to such questions as Why are you still in town then, making it difficult for them who are ashamed of you now, Iris Len-Larioca? Please state your answer in 500 words or less.”
There was a part of the story regarding Liam and Gio that felt unresolved to me; I’d have liked that tied off.
I liked the “BISHes” (Beautiful. Independent. Survivors of Humiliation) very much. They’re a group of women who take Iris under their collective wings and there she finds friends who don’t judge her for her choices and give her a safe space to be herself.
Iris unashamedly enjoys sex and that was good to see, even after sex cost her so much. By the end of the book in particular, she’s comfortable in her own skin again in a way that I felt would mean she was protected from future wounding about “The Incident”. I think there will always be things which will sting for Iris but it’s not the devastation it once was.
Both Gio and Iris read very realistically to me, in terms of their reactions to what had happened and their approach to dealing with it. Both had to adjust their approaches a little to get to their HEA.
I also liked the setting of contemporary Manila and that both characters were Filipino. While not explicitly being a book about the Philippines, the culture both Gio and Iris come from informs their personalities and their choices as much as anything else and the setting was a major part of the story. In a weird way however, the story could have been set almost anywhere (in the Western world at least) – the same tale could be told in small town America or suburban Australia.
I found myself a little lost at times as I struggled to understand some of the nuance I was clearly missing and Gio lost a few points with the conflict which arose between them at the inevitable black moment. I loved how Iris refused to be ashamed and advocated for herself and I believed Gio was more than angry words said when he was under a lot of pressure from his family and anxious about stepping out of his protective bubble. And, I believed he was genuinely sorry. His apology came with meaningful action which gave me confidence in their future.
Grade: B-
Regards,
Kaetrin
This sounds interesting and the setting is different. Did you feel that you got a strong sense of the setting in the book?
There is one thing you didn’t mention that is giving me pause. What are the odds of two people meeting in the elevator and without knowing it about each other, each turning out to have a sex scandal in his / her past?
Thanks for this review. I am glad you liked it. I have just been on a Mina V Esguerra jag where I read the entire “Chic Manila” series. It is nine novellas and (I think) five short stories. I recommend all of them. (I think I would have given this one a B, but that’s quibbling.) The novellas (which I did not think were all that short) are all available on Kindle Unlimited, but not the stories so I ended up buying the bundle from Esguerra’s website for a very reasonable price. I ‘ve enjoyed the Philippine authors I have read in the past year. The culture seems amazingly accessible, but there are many subtle differences. I kept looking up food and music references in particular, but also the close and interconnected family relationships seem quite different to the average American families. I think the setting comes across well, my biggest uncertainty was just how super-rich these people were. @Janine, in the book before this in the series there is some gossip between other characters who live in NV Park about the new woman who is living in the tower who is oddly reclusive. I got the opinion in both books that she has been keeping herself to herself. She has been in hiding so the book and the elevator scene begin right as she is beginning to come out. I started on these Manila writers with Carla de Guzman and If the Dress Fits and I am now reading Six de los Reyes and I think I like Esguerra the best, but I feel quite fan-girly about all three of them. The one thing I have noticed is that the characters seem a little young–even though they are in their twenties. I *think* that is a cultural thing, although I am not sure.
@Janine: Yes, I did – not so much the physical setting but the cultural setting, if that makes sense. The physical setting was very accessible – it’s a city with tall apartment buildings like many cities but the food and the family and various other things were clearly and definitely Filipino.
I wasn’t bothered by the odds of two people with a sex scandal in their past meeting in an elevator and not knowing information about the scandal beforehand. Iris has focused on keeping track of her own scandal and isn’t really looking for others. She is otherwise keeping her head down and as Kathy said above, the book begins when she is at the point she is ready to start coming out of that protective shell she has been living in. As for Gio, he got rid of his phone and has been avoiding all information so it made sense that he wouldn’t know. In any event, I accept far more preposterous meets-cute and situations in romance fiction all the time – this one didn’t make me raise my eyebrows at all.
@Kathy: As to the wealth of the characters – I actually know a (very) little about this. There are very wealthy Filipinos (and also plenty of Filipinos who live in poverty). I’m not an expert, but I also believe that the buying power of a dollar is different (greater) in the Philippines than here in Australia or in the US for example.
Kaetrin and Kathy, my pause isn’t about how the scandals affected their dating lives—I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of it at all. It’s more mathematical than that.
How many people in the population are involved in a sex scandal at all? Let’s say 1 in 1000 though I think the odds are actually smaller than that. From what I recall of my statistics class, the odds of two ending up living in the same building and elevator would be much smaller. Say 50 people lived in that building. The odds of 1 of the 20 being in a sex scandal would be 1 in 20, because 20×50=1000. But the odds of two would be the odds of hitting 1 in 20 twice, and that would be 1 in (20×20), if I recall my undergraduate statistics class correctly, which works out to be 1 in 400.
If half of the 50 residents all struck up conversations in the elevator, you’d still have to halve the odds of one of these two being one of them, and then halve again for 2 out of 2. Now we’re talking about odds of 1 in 1600. And thats not even factoring in the fact that they hit it off so well that they end up together, which is something most neighborly elevator conversations don’t result in.
Very small odds can work for me in a romance, if the characters have a “What are the odds?” conversation or one about how “It must have been fate” that brought them together. But I need the unlikelihood of it to be acknowledged in some way.
@Janine: All I can really say is it didn’t blip my radar. I didn’t have any problem with it. I accept things which are unlikely in fiction all the time.
Iris and Gio live on the same floor in the same tower of an upscale apartment complex in Manila. The lovely thing about the book (well, one of them – there are many) is that for Gio and Iris both, when they meet, they are not automatically judged on the basis of the sex scandal in their pasts. That is completely unique to their experience (especially when it comes to dating) since their respective scandals happened. It also means they are uniquely placed to not judge each other when they know. It means they understand a little of what the other has gone through (because of course there is a gendered aspect to it so their experiences aren’t identical). That’s the conceit of the story.
However, if the setup isn’t one you can go with then maybe the story isn’t for you.
@Kaetrin: I don’t know that I can’t go with it, it’s just something I would note and that might distract me. The non-judgement you describe sounds very appealing.