A career photojournalist, Ollie Morales is laid up in the hospital after nearly dying at the Capitol on January 6th. It gives him plenty of time to reflect on his senior year of high school, when an unexpected romance, run-ins with the law, and a shocking tragedy all conspired to propel him on his path as an artist and observer of humanity.
Phillip Vega’s FURY IN HER EYES kicks off viscerally and powerfully—with the protagonist suffering a severe beating by rioters at the Capitol on January 6th. This establishes the frame, but also some of the great interest of the text. While much of the narrative is set in 1986, the story is also a 2021 period piece reckoning with political violence, attacks on the media, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Some aspects of this setting and its arc feel under-developed (Ollie’s brother is a doctor and his chronic burnout is remarked upon, but never affects the plot; some legal wrangling about Ollie’s job doesn’t seem to add much to the underlying plotline; a subplot about Ollie begrudgingly agreeing to therapy seems abandoned), but the details feel real (even aggravatingly human ones, like family members pulling down their masks to kiss one another) and the particulars do end up motivating some of the final shocking twists in the plot.
The 1986 episodes are, in some ways, more conventional. An attack on a high school student motivates an investigation, but this jockeys for position with the developing romantic relationship between Ollie and his girlfriend Navil, a recent transfer from Belgium. At times, this romantic plot drags, and teenage Ollie’s feelings of transcendent love occasion some awkward, laughable turns of phrase (including “Our clothed bodies seemingly became one as we hugged hello” and a sentence that claims intimacy feels “[a]s delicious as Sunday morning pancakes”). Of course, teenage romance is fundamentally awkward and laughable, and these faults don’t apply to the prose style overall, which feels worldly and sometimes fatigued—apt for the career photojournalist. Although FURY IN HER EYES packs a lot into less than one academic year of story time, the narrative is sure-footed and effective at revealing how dramatic or shocking events in 1986 also shaped present-day attitudes. Though there are dramatic twists near the end of both the 1986 and 2021 arcs, they feel well-established and thematically resonant while still subverting the reader’s expectations.
Thoughtfully constructed, effectively paced, and confidently executed, FURY IN HER EYES is both a solid coming-of-age story and a reflection on the current moment in American history.
Phillip Vega’s FURY IN HER EYES effectively balances a compelling coming-of-age story with small, moving scenes of family members holding together during the COVID-19 crisis.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader
