Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez? by Isabel Yap
Read it here in about 30 minutes.
Thinking about why I love it…
Yap is from The Philippines, and that’s where this story is set. I love all the details she incorporates from Filipino culture and folklore, such as mentioning ‘yayas’, ‘Lolo’, and local ghost stories, as well as the way she includes Tagalog words (the Filipino language), which are in italics, such as ‘suplada‘, ‘manong‘, and ‘barkada‘. I looked up all the Tagalog on the internet as I was reading, because I wanted to know what these words meant; I’m interested in language/foreign languages, and expanding my knowledge, but a reader can still understand the story without needing to look anything up.
The narrative structure is interesting: the story of two teenage girls falling out over something trivial (to an adult) is interspersed with several different versions of the urban legend of eponymous Anamaria Marquez, and how she met her death. These versions all begin with ‘Anamaria Marquez was a student at St. Brebeuf’s, just like us’, or similar, and use direct address, so they capture the tales that children tell each other.
Was Anamaria Marquez murdered by the gardener, did she drown herself, or does she haunt a painting after jumping out of a window…? We never find out, but I love how the story ends: Anamaria Marquez doesn’t want revenge, or to kill anyone – she just wants some friends.
