In “Patron Saints of Nothing,” the teen’s cocoon is stripped off like a fresh scab.Ī post shared by Randy Ribay on at 9:25am PDT Were teens back then really walking cocoons oblivious to everything except for the people directly around them? Was there not a larger world of phony politicians who did things that disturbed those cocoons? That world was of course always there, but to the unwoke generations of the '50s and '60s, perhaps that didn’t matter nearly as much as the irritations inside fragile adolescent bubbles.įast forward to 2019 and the arrival of a sensational new young adult novel that exposes readers to the fire that is Duterte’s drug war.

The problem with these stories, I’ve now realized with the hindsight of 40 plus years, is how disconnected they seemed from their contemporary worlds. Bobby Heredia in Nick Joaquin’s “Candido’s Apocalypse” even used certain superpowers to see through people’s clothes, a teen’s wet fantasy that would go awry. The sappy plots of each of these “young adult” books were propelled by the main characters’ obsession with finding honesty in a world of phony adults.

In the boys’ high school where I went, we had to read a series of coming-of-age stories – “The Catcher in the Rye,” “A Separate Peace,” and “Candido’s Apocalypse” – presumably because we were just as angst-ridden as the teen-age male protagonists (I hesitate to call these self-centered youths heroes), and we needed help navigating the adolescent swamp of emotions.

Patron saints of nothing full book