Don’t you sometimes worry about what passes for YA nowadays? From toxic relationships to obscene violence (yes I’m glaring at you, ACOTAR, and let’s not even touch the steamy scenes), to books embracing woke-ness and every rage-filled controversy for the sake of being “edgy,” one can understand the controversy when discussing healthy book diets for impressionable minds. While we consider book bans to be horribly medieval, let us keep in mind that YA readers are still forming their world views in their quest for forming their inner selves. They deserve to read only the best. They deserve nothing less.

And it is in that consideration of excellence in all its forms that this reviewer can wholeheartedly recommend Catherine Dellosa’s book.

Or to put it in the book’s delightfully fun gamer’s world jargon, For The Win is a rare drop, a holy grail that is simply good, in every sense of the word.

It features a young man/boy, freshly graduated from high school, who falls desperately in crush with his best (girl) friend while they’re applying for a local game developer’s college scholarship program.

As anyone who has ever played computer games knows, this is not just a passive hobby. The virtual reality in the game is often more real than actual life, and so are the relationships with your co-op mates and enemies. So is the friendship that blossoms between Nat and Lena, until it becomes much more (on Nat’s part).

The appeal of the book lies in the gaming metaphors applied to reality. With references to actual games (I chuckled at the allusion to the Hugo Award-winning Hades) and chapters cleverly entitled “In Which I Feel Like the World is Glitching and There is No Save Point in Sight” and “In Which Rage-Quitting is Not an Option,” the character starts off seeing himself as an NPC in a PvP game for his crush’s affections, only to realize that he is short-changing both himself and the girl he sees to win as a prize.

Life isn’t a game, he realizes, and Dellosa manages to fill her book with real-life problems that are seriously grave, without being overly traumatic. Then she puts in amazingly believable characters so fleshed out, one imagines real people speaking the lines. With a gift for dialogue and a way of writing about Manila that is both realistic yet loving, the book was a short yet delightful read that I was sorry to finish.

I will always remember how Dellosa described people riding the LRT/MRT “with their heads down and their hearts closed,” and how the protagonist’s Mom observed that “How we adapt to this world is defined by our upbringing, and so far, we’ve put you in such a safe little bubble you just never learned how to cope.”

It’s not only about young love, or growing up. Even mature adults will find much that resonates in the struggles for reconciling idealism with the compromises that growing up forces on us, with the desire for independence from parents and our ever-present need for their wisdom and guidance (should we be lucky to have responsible ones).

It’s difficult to pigeonhole this book as merely “YA” or even a “romance” because it is more than those labels imply. Let’s just say that it promises a GG upon reading it, and leave it at that.

(It must also be said that Dellosa brought the fictional game Mitolohiya to life in such vivid detail, we wish the computer gods would smile and make it a reality! Imagine Starcraft but with tikbalang and aswang. We’re seated for it at the nearest Netopia.)

Buy this book if you want a good read, genre be darned. Then go and lend it to your college-student friend/pamangkin. Or buy a copy for your school library. I’m glad I did.

~Images and text by Gabriela Francisco

(Gabi Francisco (@teacher.gabi.reads)

[The writer bought FOR THE WIN by Catherine Dellosa (P695.00) in National Bookstore.]