This is the fourth of a series of educational readers about the experience of Filipino immigrants in the United States. In it, Jenny and Jay, whose parents are doctors, have recently moved from the Philippines to the United States, and are living in Boston. They find its weather cold and daunting. One day, on the subway, they believe they see a shadowy shape in the dark, one with a "single glow-in-the-dark eye" (p. 11). They describe what they have seen to their housekeeper, Cordelia, who "always seemed to know a lot about mythical beings," and suggests it might be a Cyclops (p. 13). The children make plans to investigate, and as they do, discover some of the histories of the building of the Boston subway, including an explosion in the Boylston tunnel in 1978 which killed a number of track workers. They also make friends with teenage buskers and learn some of the life of the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority). Eventually, Jenny meets the Cyclops, who turns out to be Charlie, a track worker who lost an eye in the Boylston explosion, and has been living in an unused tunnel, ever since. The Cyclops eye that Jenny saw is a glass eye. Charlie helps Jenny, who has sprained her ankle and vanishes into the shadows. Afterwards, the children leave their sandwiches for him on their way home from school.

This chapter-book aimed at readers aged 10 and up is written with the express task of telling stories about Filipina children in the United States, with a goal of offering Filipino readers stories to identify with, and also to familiarise them with aspects of life in the U.S. It uses a simple adventure-story format to show a pair of child detectives (Pinoy Private Eyes, reads the logo on the book’s cover) using public transport and finding out its history and its culture. The classical element of the Cyclops is secondary, in that there is a) no real Cyclops, and b) it plays no substantive mythological role other than to be a mysterious figure requiring ingenuity to find, and bravery to encounter. Noteworthy maybe the housekeeper’s folk knowledge, which suggests the idea of the Cyclops, as well as the children’s dedication to research at the library in order to solve the mystery. The sympathy for the homeless man is ambiguous: there is no implication that Charlie should receive assistance or compensation from the subway.

Meet the author: Marivi Soliven Blanco, Asia Society 29/7/2013, asiasociety.org (accessed: September 24, 2018)