I finished Year of the Ox with the strange sensation of having walked a landscape I half-recognized and half-feared. The novel, by Jeffry Tim Tinga, is set in early American colonial Bukidnon, on the wide plains where cattle are already grazing and the mountains still hold older stories. It is not a gentle book. It is dense with flight, captivity, ritual, and the quiet violence of land being claimed, and it lingers.
Tinga writes from inside a particular place. The story moves among several figures who rarely share the same understanding of events. There is Oto, a young man from the village of Palaos who is captured while riding the plains. There is Celestina, brought back from Manila to a house that no longer feels like home, caught between her father’s ambitions and the Governor’s presence. There is Camilo Sanchez, managing a ranch that is never fully under control, and Lieutenant-Governor Michael MacGabriel, whose plans for the province extend beyond ordinary administration. Around them move cowboys, shamans, constabulary officers, and the living memory of Mount Kitanglad itself.
What stays with me is the way the land is treated as more than scenery. The scattered trees, the dry smell of cogon, the sudden drop into ravines, the cave that the people of Palaos understand as something ancient and generative—these are not backdrop. They carry the cosmology of the place. When the novel shifts into the indigenous telling of how the sky was pushed higher and how the sleeping titan must not be woken, the colonial project of fencing, cutting, and ranching takes on a different weight. Progress and extraction begin to look like a form of trespass that the mountain itself might one day answer. Tinga’s handling of these myths never feels ornamental; they shape how characters see risk, kinship, and the right to move across the plateau.
The book is also unflinching about power. The rituals that appear—first whispered about in a ranch house, later enacted—are grotesque, but they feel like an extreme expression of something already present in the ordinary acts of taking land, silencing witnesses, and treating certain bodies as disposable. Celestina’s position is especially precarious; she moves through rooms, stables, and landscapes where almost no one sees her clearly, and the novel does not rescue her with easy triumph. The same is true of the people of Palaos. Their resistance is not romanticized into pure heroism, nor is their isolation presented as pure wisdom. Both sides are shown making choices under pressure, and those choices cost them.
The prose is plain and sometimes uneven, the kind of writing that prioritizes the next event over polished lyricism. That directness can flatten certain emotional turns, yet it also keeps the book from drifting into nostalgia or exoticism. The historical details—the new province, the ranch, the arrival of officials from Manila, the lingering shadow of earlier conflicts—feel specific rather than decorative. You sense Tinga is writing from a deep familiarity with Bukidnon’s terrain and its layered histories, colonial and indigenous alike.
Year of the Ox will not suit every reader. It is violent, morally uneasy, and unwilling to tidy its conflicts into clear victories. But for anyone interested in Philippine historical fiction that takes indigenous cosmology seriously, or in stories that examine colonial expansion from the ground rather than from the governor’s office alone, Jeffry Tim Tinga’s novel offers something uncommon: a work that treats the plateau, the mountain, and the people who move between them as the real subject. The grass is wide. The trees are far apart. Under both, older forces are still awake.
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