Review of Now You See Us by Balli Kaur Jaswal

*Now You See Us* by Balli Kaur Jaswal (2023). Published by William Morrow & Company.

One of my favorite interests as a reader, writer, and researcher in graduate school are the stories that aren’t often told in mainstream perspectives. I first saw the synopsis for Now You See Us through one of the many book publications I read and knew I wanted to read this one as soon as I figured out it was about Filipina workers who’d come to other parts of Southeast Asia in search for work, then it was hook, line, and sinker. I knew straight off of the bat that this was an area I knew little about.

Like I was familiar with the fact a lot of workers from the Philippines search for work abroad in order to get better opportunities than their home country, which is pretty sad that this is the case.

But I wasn’t aware of the extent of this issue in countries like Singapore, and I think books like these are the perfect opportunity to grow and learn more about the experiences of people who aren’t often represented in mainstream media, let alone in a positive light.

I’ve rambled enough already, so let’s get into the review!

After a murder occurs, a Filipino maid is blamed for it. It’s up to her fellow nationals to get down to what actually happened.

This is a book that takes a while to get to the action, as the driving conflict of the novel is that one of the maids of another family, Flor, ends up becoming the one accused of murdering the woman she works for. It takes a good chunk of the novel to get to this point, and it doesn’t happen until around sixty or seventy pages into the book.

But before we get there, Jaswal takes her time in introducing the three main characters who are going to get to the point of what really happened here.

So our three protagonists are Corazon, who had left to the Philippines after working in Singapore and has returned, there’s Donita who’s young and now madly in love with an Indian worker in Singapore, and Angel, who is struggling with her personal life and fears that she is going to be replaced in her job.

Together, they band together as friends because of their shared experiences working as domestic workers here in Singapore, and the fact that some of their bosses are absolutely terrible.

There’s also a Facebook group that the maids are on that has the bosses, who complain about the Filipina maids and will basically do anything to get some of them fired and blacklisted. A lot of these messages are pretty petty and far out there, so it becomes obvious as to why Flor is the scapegoat for the murder in the beginning.

However, Donita swears she spotted Flor in the rain, when the murder was supposed to have happened, in the downpour when she was heading home from a rendezvous with her Indian lover.

The course of their friendship now steers away from the solidarity of their shared experiences and trauma—one of the three women is struggling with the death of her nephew, who worked hard to get into a good school and trying to get an education—to trying to figure out what happened to the woman who was murdered.

At the same time, they struggle with their own bosses, as some are having their own situations in their careers

I think as a book, this is a really interesting topic, and it does succeed in some ways. A problem I was having throughout the course of the novel was the fact that these stories seemed pretty disjointed, and focusing on three, potentially four, different stories ended up pulling the narrative in multiple different directions that simply didn’t work for me. I wanted it to become more focused as I was reading, and it didn’t.

Overall Thoughts

Considering this is a book that probably is introducing a lot of Americans and Westerners to the fact that there are people working in unfavorable conditions in Southeast Asia, especially the many Filipinas who are going through immense amounts of wealth inequality when compared to their wealthier bosses.

These are women who are rarely depicted in literature and aren’t seen in everyday narratives, and I think we need more of these kinds of perspectives.

I do think the book felt like it was lacking authenticity though, and while I can applaud it for what it’s doing, I want to hear firsthand from these women in real life now.

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