The stories are a revelation. They form a continuous whole and they are - though indirectly for the most part - a chronicle of the decline of the Philippine provincial gentry.

The reader gathers the stories piecemeal, at first in small events of undefined significance and later in full awareness of the landed aristocracy on the eve of decay.

The slow process of revelation is deliberate for we view the successive events through the eyes of a child, then of an adolescent and finally of the child grown to full womanhood. This witness is Emma, the child undergoing an education in life.

Emma's first encounter is with her childhood friend, Pe Len, who is told, though gently, that there is a gulf between the classes across which bridges cannot be built. Then, Felix, the ugly gardener, whose poetic sensibility Emma shared and who drowned himself in the ocean in search of their common fantasy, "the man in the moon." Karia, the scavenger, turned maid, and the child's confidant, tells the growing Emma of the race of money makers who amass wealth squeezed from the blood of murdered children and in the end Emma with her sharpened sensitivities begins to understand that the money maker is non other than her strong-willed grandmother, the archetypal matriarch of a gentry grown rapacious.

The stories, gathered here in temporal sequence, start in a style of disarming simplicity, as befits a child through whose eyes we view the events. Although the stories differ in weight and importance, in general they gather force and complexity as Emma matures and her grasp of the world deepens and intensifies. And here at last, in the final tales, emerges the grown Emma's bitter judgment on the deadened moral senses of a world on the brink of collapse.

Armando D. Manalo