fighting for the Negros Island's and the Philippines' own independence. As erotic novel In My Sad Republic, Gamalinda incorporated the genre of erotica such as what Angela Stuart-Santiago described as a "dash of friar erotica" (also known as "priest erotica") witnessed during the diminishing decades of the rule of the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Gamalinda described the love scene between a Spanish parish priest nicknamed Padre Batchoy and a native lass as if the friar was inserting a sacred host into the lips of a native girl's sex organ. There was another love scene—during a secret rendezvous between the novel's hero Magbuela and his beloved De Urquiza—wherein (according to Stuart-Santiago) De Urquiza did a "strange thing", lifting her a head a little to give Magbuela a prolonged bite on the hard and firm muscle located above Magbuela's collarbone, as if De Urquiza wanted to remain forever connected to Magbuela's body. Analysis Book critic Angela Stuart-Santiago compared the reading of My Sad Republic to reading Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Chilean novelist Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits because of Gamalinda's style of combining fact and fiction. Stuart-Santiago described My Sad Republic as a rare Philippine novel that tackles the events during the Philippine–American War viewed through the eyes of the defeated, subdued, subjugated, and colonized Filipino people, and not through the point of view of triumphant foreigners and colonizers. Stuart-Santiago further reiterated that the author of My Sad Republic wrote the novel in "marvelous Philippine English", a language of "misery and sorrow" which has similarities to the characteristics of other native languages of the Philippines, which are languages and dialects that "a hundred years ago" had been "exorcised"—suppressed or almost brought into extinction - —by the English language rooted from the United States and the United Kingdom. References Philippine novels 2000 novels Philippine English-language novels Philippine romance novels Historical novels Novels set in the Philippines Novels set during the Philippine–American War Erotic novels Philippine Revolution