Ron Does Stuff

For most of this blog’s existence, I’ve mostly been reacting and reviewing television shows or movies. But in the olden times when the world was young, I was a book reviewer. I exclusively blogged about books and other book adjacent things.

But then I had to become a slave to capitalism so that I could stay alive and also the pandemic happened and I just…could not read for very long after that. So I had to pivot and do something else, which was watching stuff and writing about it.

However, I’ve been getting into a reading groove lately and while the numbers aren’t that impressive compared to how much I used to read, it’s still an improvement! Just last night I was able to finish reading this Mafia book set in the Philippines!

Angel: A Star-Crossed Lovers Mafia Romance Novella is about Stella, a girl who finds herself entangled with Trey after one fateful night at an intersection. That one encounter soon turns into multiple encounters and Stella thinks that there may be something between her and Trey.

But Trey seems to be living another life that Stella is only vaguely aware of, a life that involves deaths and explosions and battles over territory. With Stella cut off from a big part of Trey’s life, will their burgeoning attraction be able to fully blossom? Or will Trey’s life in the shadows ultimately kill their love before it even sees the light?

I got Angel: A Star-Crossed Lovers Mafia Romance Novella for free since it’s currently on sale on Amazon, and with free stuff like this I tend to be a little gentler when it comes to my opinion on it. I got it for free after all! And one thing that I immediately appreciated was how quick of a read it is at six chapters. I’ve only started to get back my reading groove lately so the length of this one wasn’t too intimidating.

Shirley Siaton also has a talent for evoking atmosphere, like with Trey’s first appearance as well as with describing the torrential rains that Stella had to deal with in chapter two. Trey always has an aura of mystery and danger surrounding him, which one can definitely attribute to Shirley’s writing.

However, the novella had a lot of other problems that really took me out of it. For one, I had a lot of trouble figuring out just how old Stella is in this book. It says she’s in college, but the climactic part of the book happens during Stella’s prom and I don’t think colleges hold proms? Or am I that old and removed from the world of young people now? Maybe it’s a thing in Iloilo, where this work is set? Because there’s a world of difference between Stella meeting Trey as an 18-year-old college freshman and meeting him as a 14-year-old high school freshman. Trey is in his mid-twenties at the start of the book.

While I initially appreciated how short the work is, it eventually ended up being a big negative because it didn’t give Shirley the opportunity to fully explore her characters and have them interact more often. I think the two of them only met four times in the span of four years? You know very little about the characters outside of their sporadic meetings with each other. As a reader, it’s hard to feel the kilig when the characters barely spend time with each other. There at least needs to be some proximity!

The shortness also blunts the shock that should have come with the revelations made later on in the book. Because Shirley wasn’t given the opportunity to fully explore and flesh out the lives of these characters, the revelations later on feel out of left field. I know you shouldn’t spoon feed your reader but this is more like starving them. Give them some scraps at least!

I feel like if Shirley were given a longer word count, this would have been a much more enjoyable read for me as she clearly has the writing skill. However, in its current form I have to say that it really didn’t work out for me.