Always Hiding

"Do you still love him?" I asked.
"With all the bile in my body."

That exchange between a Filipino daughter and mother was basically the high point of the novel for me.

In this coming-of-age mother-daughter novel, you're presumably supposed to identify with the daughter, a self-centered creature of privilege, but I found the mother much more compelling. I'd be interested in reading her story--about growing up working in her father's bookstore, falling in love, being married to a philanderer, leaving her husband and teenage daughter in the Philippines to make her way in the US, going from being someone with many servants to being a maid, making peace with her snooty ungrateful daughter, etc.

Or maybe I'm just old.