A WOMAN OF SUBSTANCE

A Filipino woman is widowed and left to care for her nine children in Morgan’s historical novel.

In 1928, Maxima and Eugenio Agbay enjoy a blessed life in Sambat, a quiet village in the Philippines. They own an increasingly successful embroidery business, fulfilling merchants’ orders in both Manila and the United States. Not content with being a traditional housewife, Maxima helps her husband, overseeing the 20 workers manufacturing their fashionable designs. The happy trajectory of their lives is tragically disrupted when Eugenio is waylaid by an acute case of appendicitis and dies on the operating table. Suddenly, Maxima is all alone only days before Christmas, solely responsible for her brood of nine children, the youngest of whom is only 2 years old. In this historically astute narrative, Maxima rises to the challenge before her—she refuses to distribute her kids across extended family, keeping the tribe intact, and she takes over Eugenio’s firm. Immersed in a “male-oriented business community,” Maxima initially conceals the fact of her widowhood, afraid she’ll appear vulnerable to the merchants who owe her money (“Nobody in Manila suspected anything or asked for her husband. She acted confidently and avoided empty chatter”). Morgan tracks Maxima’s extraordinary maturation as a business woman—she eventually becomes an accomplished landowner—through the dark days of the Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II. The plot is based on the true story of the author’s maternal grandmother, and the novel has an air of both personal and historical verisimilitude; for all of her dramatic daring, Maxima is a fully realized character and instantly relatable. The paroxysms suffered by the Philippines during World War II, which plunged the nation into existential crisis, are portrayed by Morgan with exactitude and dramatic power. This is an inspiriting tale, and a historically fascinating one as well.

An engrossing peek into a difficult but admirably undaunted life.