The Son of Good Fortune: A Novel

Summary

A Recommended Book From:

FINALIST FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE

From award-winning author Lysley Tenorio,
comes a big hearted debut novel following an undocumented Filipino son as he
navigates his relationship with his mother, an uncertain future, and the place
he calls home

Excel spends his days trying to seem like an unremarkable American
teenager. When he’s not working at The Pie Who Loved Me (a spy-themed pizza
shop) or passing the time with his girlfriend Sab (occasionally in one of their
town’s seventeen cemeteries), he carefully avoids the spotlight.

But Excel knows
that his family is far from normal. His mother, Maxima, was once a Filipina
B-movie action star who now makes her living scamming men online. The old man
they live with is not his grandfather, but Maxima’s lifelong martial arts
trainer. And years ago, on Excel’s tenth birthday, Maxima revealed a secret
that he must keep forever. “We are ‘TNT’—tago ng tago,” she told him, “hiding and
hiding.” Excel is undocumented—and one accidental slip could uproot his entire
life.

Casting aside the paranoia and secrecy of his childhood, Excel takes a
leap, joining Sab on a journey south to a ramshackle desert town called Hello
City. Populated by drifters, old hippies, and washed-up techies—and existing
outside the normal constructs of American society—Hello City offers Excel a
chance to forge his own path for the first time. But after so many years of
trying to be invisible, who does he want to become? And is it possible to put
down roots in a country that has always considered you an outsider?

Thrumming
with energy and at once critical and hopeful, The Son of Good Fortune is a
luminous story of a mother and son testing the strength of their bond to their
country—and to each other.