Patron Saints of Nothing

By: Randy Ribay / Narrated By: Ramón de Ocampo

Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins

Kinda a surprise, but wholly delighted!

Oh. My. GOSH!

I just scrolled through recent reviews and discovered that a PLEthora of ‘em earned an almighty >MEH<. How disappointing is that?! I mean, each one was an investment, in money/credits, in freakin’ TIME! What a wretched waste of time. I coulda been off desperately trying to fashion beloved cats outta air dry clay for a class. Instead, I was no doubt desperately trying to stay awake as I listened to Mediocrity.

And here?

Oh good golly gosh, I so enjoyed Patron Saints of Nothing. Yeh, at the beginning I was totally not into our main character, Jason, as he seems lazy and terse, and very very bored with life, choosing to play vid games instead of, oh I dunno, doing something else to ease the monotony of his life. I’ve heard it before: Bored people are boring people. And Jay trudging along, engrossed in getting to a new level/score, can’t even look up when his dad comes in to break some news:

Jay’s cousin Jun is dead. This hits Jay like a ton of bricks. Where once the two had been kinda sorta pen pals, and truly close, the passing of years diminished Jay’s interest in getting back to Jun, no longer responding to any of the many, MANY letters that Jun sent from the Philippines, where Jay was born. Immediately, Jay is wracked with guilt, and he’s full of questions. How did Jun die? Was he sick? Was he in an accident? The response Jay receives from his father is, Let’s Not Talk About It. It’s over, done with, Jun had run away from his family home, so basically, he was already Dead To His Family.

Still reeling from the shock, Jay concocts a plan: He’ll go to the Philippines, meet with family, ask some questions. And he’ll find out just how Jun died. More? He might just find out how Jun lived, and that would mean the world to Jay.

The story then truly begins with his trip back to the Philippines where he meets and stays with family. First on the list is Jun’s father, a man who disowned this son of his and the one who pretends Jun never existed, his death doesn’t matter, and shut the hell up anyway. Like that. But as the country is in the middle of violent cleansing of drug addicts and drug dealers, also of dissidents, and Jun’s father is very much a supporter of the Fascist ruler and government, Jay wonders what Dad had to do with it: Would he kill his own son for being an addict; how will Jay handle it all?

So be prepared for the mystery that was Jun’s death, the mystery that was Jun’s life. Jay gets around, asks questions, ruffles feathers (BIG time), and learns ever so slowly about this cousin of his, this friend he just kinda let leave his life.

Kudos to author Randy Ribay for his story crafting, the characters he created, the choices he made. Every single Hero of any story has to have a character arc, and Jay’s was incredibly done. Yeh Jay was a trifle annoying with his apathy and lack of purpose, and with the way he just accepted anything and everything; but by the end, it’s true growth one can see. By the end, it’s a much more mature individual we see. By the end, I was a trifle (Just a trifle, yeh) weepy. It was a lovely ending to a well-done story.

At first, I thought I was gonna haaaaate Ramón de Ocampo’s narration because it was so bland in the beginning. I was fearing hours of sheer I Don’t Know That I Can Stand This Monotone. But then I realized it worked quite well because Jay’s life was in monotone. As Ribay crafted some sweet stories, as he crafted some desperate and fraught moments, as he crafted some hellish scene-scapes, Ocampo guided us through it all, handy accents at the ready (And I must confess that I’m ignorant as all get-out when it comes to not having a clue whether accents and tones Ocampo used were spot-on… or not…). Ocampo did quite well, so Bravo for grand narration of a multi-faceted story.

I could pick at things, little things, well, big ones: Everything Jay did, every dangerous choice he made? Well, he coulda been knocked senseless multiple times, he coulda clashed with adults a little bit more. He coulda had it held against him that, when Jun needed him most, he was AWOL. There coulda been grudges and harsh harsh harsh words. But there weren’t. It was clean; it was easy; and thank GOSH that made listening to it vaaaaastly more comfortable than holding my breath in anticipation of something wretched happening. You know my toes curl easily: I just canNOT handle adrenaline surges well… at ALL.

I’ll wrap it up here just to say, just to encourage you to give it a try.

After soooo many >MEH<s, this rousing cry of: HUZZAH! feels mighty good…!