In One Tribe, the death of Isabel Manalo’s unborn child stirs wide spread speculation in her small Midwestern suburb. Fed up with the noise of local tsismosas (gossips), she moves to Virginia Beach to teach myth and history to Filipino American youth. Isa Manalo walks into the chaos of drive by shootings, beauty pageants, and community politicking. At every turn she runs up against youth gangs who distrust her, community elders who disapprove of her loose outsider ways, and a Filipino boyfriend who accuses her of acting too white. Eventually Isa fights back. As Hurricane Emilia brews at the edge of the east coast, Isa opens her house to a local girl gang and nourishes their troubled spirits, instigating change sudden as the shift of tropical winds. Galang infuses her novel about Filipino Americans with a sense of urgency by crafting it around the lives of a group of troubled teenagers struggling to find their way in both their ethnic and geographic communities. Their parents are determined to keep the teens tied to tradition and have enlisted the aid of drama teacher Isabel Manalo to provide instruction on Filipino history. But Isabel has her own demons and finds herself conflicted over how to address the needs of her students while respecting their parents' demands. As the teens become more embroiled in gang violence, she is forced to make tough decisions about how best to help them. Ultimately, she must show them how to craft their own solutions, just as she must find a way to discover her true self. The danger teens face and the concern Galang expresses are real, and she demands that readers acknowledge just how difficult it can be to straddle two ways of life while seeking your own place in the world. Colleen Mondor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "In Virginia Beach, Isabel galvanizes the drifting teens with reenactments of the Filipino myth of creation and other empowering stories of ethnic identity. Yet she is criticized in the community for her white ways and for engendering what the parents see as disrespect for authority; they insist she stage a traditional beauty pageant instead. Her attempts to befriend the vapid, in-fighting teenage girls show her that their lives are circumscribed by tsismis (literally, a dangerous monsoon rain; figuratively, gossip) and hiya (a hot flower in bloom, metaphor for the shame of speaking up). Gradually, Isabel begins to transform herself into a fighting Filipina with the help of a fellow teacher's aggressive political preaching and through an autobiographical photography project that forces her to examine her own life."-- "Kirkus Reviews" In Virginia Beach, Isabel galvanizes the drifting teens with reenactments of the Filipino myth of creation and other empowering stories of ethnic identity. Yet she is criticized in the community for her "white" ways and for engendering what the parents see as disrespect for authority; they insist she stage a traditional beauty pageant instead. Her attempts to befriend the vapid, in-fighting teenage girls show her that their lives are circumscribed by tsismis (literally, a dangerous monsoon rain; figuratively, gossip) and hiya (a hot flower in bloom, metaphor for the shame of speaking up). Gradually, Isabel begins to transform herself into a "fighting Filipina" with the help of a fellow teacher's aggressive political preaching and through an autobiographical photography project that forces her to examine her own life. Kirkus Reviews " “M. Evelina Galang’s One Tribe is a bold, ambitious, moving, and deeply surprising novel about the necessity and dangers of the human need to belong to other people. Galang writes beautifully and precisely about the world of her wonderful main character, Isabel Manalo—her students, her lovers, her parents, her fears—and in doing so has written a universal book about teaching, fear, parenting, and love.” (Elizabeth McCracken) M. EVELINA GALANG is the author of Her Wild American Self, a collection of short fiction. Galang is also the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, which won ForeWord Reviews’s Gold Book of the Year Award for 2003. In 2001, she was the Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in the Philippines where she continued her work on Surviving Comfort Women of World War II for her collection of essays, Lolas’ House: Women Living with War. Galang teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami. Used Book in Good Condition