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Isabel Yap’s debut collection Never Have I Ever offers a wide variety of stories. They range from the definitely horrific “Good Girls” (The Retreat is a place intended to reform bad girls; whether it works on its young inmates is, in general, an open question, but it definitely doesn’t work for the monstrous Kaye) to the science fiction of “Milagroso”. (In the near future, manufactured food is tasty and both more affordable and more nutritional than the real thing. Still, people yearn for the natural and thrill when, with an annual miracle, a saint allows a taste of the old.) In the moving “Cup of Salt Tears”, Makino, who grieves for her terminally ill husband, was saved from drowning as a child by a kappa (a Japanese river monster that can be benign). Now her husband is dying, and the kappa reappears to assert his love for her. This is a modern fairy tale about bargains. “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez?”, set in a Filipino girl’s school, ....
Victoria Isabel Santiago Yap was born May 23, 1990 in Manila in the Philippines and grew up in Quezon City. She attended Ateneo de Manila University for her first two years of undergrad, then moved to the US, where she earned a BS in Marketing from Santa Clara University in 2013. That summer she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 she has served as secretary for the Clarion Foundation. She worked in the tech industry in the Bay Area and in London before completing an MBA at Harvard Business School, and is currently a product manager at an early-stage startup. ....
There are worlds within the cutthroat music of Isabel Yap’s debut short story collection Never Have I Ever, and they are wondrous and vicious and true. Yap’s work spans the speculative, weaving fantasy, horror, and sci-fi and wielding each with deft expertise. Here, Filipino folklore breathes through the cruelties and magic of the contemporary, infused with history and legend. Each story is a cleverly crafted gem, resonant and surprising and deeply profound. The collection as a whole establishes Yap firmly as one of the sharpest masters of the form. As a Fil-Am reader, I found so much of myself in these stories. That specific cadence and tension of family, the rich folklore of my childhood that I so rarely see represented or imagined in contemporary American writing. Whether Yap’s writing about a diaspora experience or a story rooted in Manila, that sense of place and complex identity is drawn so vividly. She carves out details clever and true. ....