"He’s grown up translating his world, servants’ tongue into sala’s mouth, Waray and Tagalog into glimmering, correct spelling in Spanish onto the schoolbook page: a kind of magic, or witchcraft, he thinks, as words transform from one meaning to another and yet sound the same, mimicking the mind’s process, the way the world shape-shifts as he observes it, his brother into a moth, the armored beetle, kagang, into a leaf, pahina."

La Tercera is a dense, and relatively unforgiving novel. Apostol cares little for whether you can follow the rapid language shifting, time shifting, place shifting and switching between the sprawling cast with their own sprawling family trees. But like many literary novels, Apostol rewards your investment with a tale whose emotional impact grows with what you have invested, and whose swooping, immersive descriptions and pithy one liners ("In my mom’s world, you could have no money, and a maid would still be washing your child’s hair.") can be enjoyed just as they are.
 This is a book which uses language to immerse the reader in a world, to bring forth what being in a place, of a place (and not of a place) feels like. The book swirls with descriptions, dialogue, which often tumble out furiously with scant explanation of when, where or sometimes who, we are with. It is in turn exhilerating and exhausting.
This is also a book about language, and how we create our worlds through it. It is particularly a book about language, power, colonialism and class. Apostol's characters defend and attack through their languages, define themselves, take and surrender power in their choices of language. Some speak only in Waray, refusing the world which would colonise them. Others speak with a distinctive polyglot, effortlessly peppering words of Waray, Tagalog, Spanish and English together, to demonstrate their ownership of their own space. Characters use their language choices to create distance or eradicate it. Most of all, their choices define themselves. There is a lot readers without Waray will miss, but there is also plenty we don't.
Rosario, our central protagonist, is trying to untangle her own grief, and unease at how to define herself in a community that has set(s) of definitions she stuggles to navigate. As she delves into constructing the stories of her great grandfather and great uncle, brothers in a war no-one wants to admit happened, she also starts to peel back the layers of her unforgettable mother - the kind of women considered "too much" in most of my worlds, but whose vivacity is conditionally celebrated in her upper class filipino world. Just as Rosario gets into reconstructing her ancestors inner worlds, we start to see how little of her mother's she has understood.
But this makes it sound a lot more linear than the experience, which plunges the reader from frozen contemporary New York, to rivers of Layte Island, to the opulance of central Manila, and warfare-infested jungles. Much of the pleasure here is in the moments, and there a rather a lot of them, so it might be best to take this one slow.