Review: The Future Chosen by Mina V. Esguerra

4.5 stars

*MINOR SPOILER ALERT*

Like many people, I started 2017 uneasy about the world political environment, and I chose my first read of the new year - Mina V. Esguerra's The Future Chosen - because I liked the subtitle 'a political romance'. I wanted that alternate political reality where I was sure that everything was going to be okay. However, I didn't anticipate how invested I would be in the process of getting to that HEA; it's a month later, and I'm still recovering from this star-crossed romance.

To prevent political dynasties, the fictional country of Isla has a law where only one person from each family can hold political office, and Lourdes and Andres both have their families' political ambitions resting on their shoulders. They should be thinking about their bright political futures - and they are - but they are also thinking about each other, which is a problem: the only way they could be together is if one of them gave up their place in politics. Since neither is willing to do so, they're at an impasse. There's no point pursuing a relationship that's going nowhere - especially one that could destroy their careers - but somehow they just can't seem to give each other up. 

Starting with Andres and Lourdes' time in a school for future public servants, The Future Chosen is relayed in a series of short-ish installments, with time-jumps in between. We see Lourdes and Andres together, going their separate ways, and then finding their way back to each other again. 

Partly because of the episodic narrative structure and time jumps, Esguerra uses the introduction to warn the reader that The Future Chosen is different to her other works, and she's right. I am a big fan of Esguerra's contemporaries, but here she has constructed something that feels high-stakes in a way that I have rarely encountered. I loved the suspense of not knowing how everything was all going to play out (even though I'm usually the kind of person who reads the back page to make sure that things turns out alright!). Maybe this change of tone won't work for everyone, but it certainly did for me. 

I think I was able to immerse myself so completely in Lourdes and Andres' romance because it had a fictional setting - which gave it some distance from the overwhelming hopelessness that can accompany the real world - and yet it was also relevant and familiar. Esguerra is clear that the nation-state of Isla is not the Philippines, but there were some similarities. However, the idea of an anti-dynasty law, while having particular resonance in the Philippines, is also one of universal relevance: think the Kennedys, the Nehru-Gandhis, Trump appointing Jared Kushner as his advisor. 

Esguerra conducts an extremely nuanced discussion around her anti-dynasty law, called the Mayo-Matias law. As the old saying goes, one man's utopia is another one's dystopia, and the certainly has dystopic undertones for Andres and Lourdes' freedom to choose their partners and careers. There is also the question of whether it exchanges one type of gatekeeping for political positions for others. Andres muses that:

While the law that prevented him and Lourdes from marrying, once they were elected, had its staunch supporters, it was also a law that made their democracy less…democratic. It prescribed a path for public officials, defined the qualifications, in ways that could be abused, and that excluded some of the nation’s best and brightest. It was a program that was meant to level the playing field but Andres believed it bred, programmed, rewarded certain types of individuals. 

The counterpoint to that view is provided right at the beginning of the novel:

Mayo-Matias Law has not kept power, money, and fame away from those who may abuse it, but we know what it has done—it has restored our trust in those who serve us....We will not find better candidates by lowering the score requirements, allowing privately educated entrants, or by amending the law in any way. Give an inch, and we let in doubt. We erode what MML has given us: faith in public servants. 

There was one last aspect of The Future Chosen that I absolutely adored, and that was the way it was unconstrained by gender stereotypes. When a couple's career ambitions come into conflict in the real world, it is often the woman who makes the sacrifice. Here, there was not even the slightest hint that - as the woman - Lourdes would or should be the one to give up her career in favour of Andres' (although, admittedly, perhaps this is because it is a decision that doesn't just affect her, but would require a political freeze to be placed on her whole family). If anything, Lourdes has a stronger claim to having a political career, given that she is a granddaughter of a former president, while Andres' family have only held middling-level positions. Of the two of them, Lourdes is also the more pragmatic and unemotional, while Andres is the one upset by their parting of ways, and more invested in their relationship.

But it's possible I was even more invested than Andres. The Future Chosen was suspenseful and sweet and clever and just so good, and I didn't want it to end. The ending is more of a HFN with hope for a HEA than an actual HEA, which makes sense, because the characters haven't entirely overcome everything keeping them apart. Even though I understand that and I think - objectively - it was the right decision, I still feel a slight lack of closure from that little question mark hanging over Andres and Lourdes future. That's my problem, though, and not the book's. 

I really hope that Esguerra expands this world (although I'm not sure that she will, because this was inspired by discussion around an anti-dynasty law in the Philippines). The world-building is so strong, the tone worked so well for me, and - of course - it would mean that we could see Andres and Lourdes further in the future. 

Non-Fiction Review: Kicking the Kremlin by Marc Bennetts

Kicking the Kremlin by Marc Bennetts covers Putin's rise to and consolidation of power, and dissidence against him. It was interesting and well constructed, but in many ways, I wish either that I'd picked a book with a slightly different focus, or that this book had been written later and, essentially, was a different book itself. 

Bennetts raised several key points that I hadn't necessarily explicitly understood about Russia. The first is the importance of the 'good tsar, bad boyars' mentality that has persisted throughout the ages, which allows Russians to be dissatisfied with aspects of their lives, and yet still support the man in charge, because localise this dissatisfaction on their regional officials. 

Related to this is the idea that Western-style democracy simply doesn't and won't work in Russia, justified by the great demographic and geographic spread of its people, and by historical example. 

All politicians aim to create an 'us' and a 'them', but Putin has been very successful at this. I wasn't familiar with the situation surrounding Putin's rise to power, but it was interesting to see how the war in Chechnya created an Other and a sense of fear, and how he leveraged this to increase his popularity and demonstrate that he was the man for the job. There are obvious parallels here to the war in Ukraine and the current NATO/Russia tension but the book can't draw them out because it concludes its narrative in 2013 and was published a month before the annexation of the Crimea in March 2014. 

In the West, our picture of protest in Russia is one of Pussy Riot and mass demonstrations, but Bennetts draws out the lack of unity amongst dissenters. There's the far right, the far left, and many small groups in between, but there isn't - or maybe I should say wasn't, as of the end of the book - any mass movement that was universally appealing to people dissatisfied with Putin. Even people who were successful rallying points, like anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, had trouble connecting with wider audiences and movements.   

Bennetts also highlights the 'why now?' aspect of to the dissidence faced by Putin, who has been in power (including the time he spent as Prime Minister with his ally Medvedev as President) since the turn of the century. After the societal trauma of the collapse of the USSR and the tumult of the Yeltsin years, people liked Putin because he brought stability and economic security. They weren't so concerned with abstract political freedoms so long as there was bread on the table. Now, however, there is an younger generation who only remember these times as a child, if they remember them at all, and some do not feel that it should be an either/or scenario.

Overall, I'm not sure how relevant the book's conclusions, made in 2013, actually are. So much has happened in the interim - Crimea, Ukraine, M17, Sochi, Syria, just general tension between Russia and NATO/the US - that, in many ways, Kicking the Kremlin has more of a historical feel than a current affairs one. As a result, I've come away feeling like I don't have solid understanding of dissidence in Russia, despite reading a whole book on it. Essentially, for whatever is happening today, all that I've read is just the backstory, and I guess that's why it was in the bargain bin at the bookshop.

EDIT: It was been brought to my attention in the comments that Bennetts released an updated version of Kicking the Kremlin this year entitled I'm Going to Ruin Their Lives. I haven't read it (yet), but if he grapples with everything as well as he does in Kicking the Kremlin while discussing the current situation in Russia, I imagine it would be well worth the time.

Review: Special Interests by Emma Barry

4.5 stars

Normally, the taglines on romance novels are one of my least favourite parts of Romancelandia - they're either overblown, twee, misleading or play into stereotypes about the genre (on some memorable occasions, they manage to be all at once). But the one for Emma Barry's Special Interests is an example of what happens when taglines go right:

In fact, Special Interests as a whole is an example of what happens when things go right. We open in Washington D.C. some time after union organiser Millie Frank was involved in a hostage situation.  In retrospect, it's farcical, given the hostage-taker was wearing a chicken costume and only had a fake gun, but that doesn't mean she's not having a hard time getting over it. Especially since she's now a household name in DC. When she bumps into Parker Beckett - literally - she's so sick of all the attention that she uncharacteristically asks him home with her. She's mortified when he declines, but the two of them just keep crossing paths; budget negotiations are in full swing and Millie's trying to get Parker's Democrat Senator boss not to throw the working class under a bus by giving into the Republicans' proposed budget compromises. As for Parker, he's finding it hard to maintain a moral compass, and harder still to ignore an idealistic union representative who still uses the term 'working people' unironically and suffers from night terrors.

If Special Interests has a theme, it's balancing idealism and cynicism. Both Millie and Parker have long since realised that working in D.C. is not all it's cracked up to be, but they've dealt with this realisation in different ways; Millie's clung to her faith in organised labour as a cure to the ills of the political system, while Parker's become jaded and fatalistic. As characters, they are almost unparalleled. At the outset, Millie comes across as whiny and slightly irrational, but that's fair enough given the whole hostage thing. It also led to some good tension with Parker, who, in Millie's words, was "conceited, presumptuous and paternal". Barry skillfully peels back layer after layer from two seemingly self-absorbed characters, revealing them to be extremely complex and allowing them to evolve as each challenges the others' worldview. 

And the plot, as I mentioned, is about US politics budget negotiations, which perennially pop up in the news but that I've never really understood before now. So, if you have an interest in American politics, but don't want to follow the primaries too closely lest Donald Trump makes you lose faith in humanity, try Special Interests!