The novel, ¡°The Woman Who Had Two Navels¡±, is about Connie Escobar, a rich and confused girl, who goes to Hong Kong to find herself and to run away from her troubled life in the Philippines. She encounters the Monson brothers, Pepe, a horse doctor, and Tony, a priest, who desperately tries to help her realize that she was living in an illusion of lies she has created to escape reality rather than facing it. Throughout Connie¡¯s wild search, she sucks other people into her confusion and madness as well; breaking their relationships and making them question their own values. The story ends tragically with the death of both her mother and her husband while she runs away with Paco Texeira, a bandleader she fancied back in Manila.
             I expected a lot from this novel since it is considered as a Filipino Literary Classic. The novel failed me. Its major flaws are its plot, its characters, and the argument the author presented at the end of the novel, which in my honest opinion was the only note-worthy part of the novel.
             The novel failed at its plot. It was confusing. There were so many things happening that the whole story seemed like a wild goose chase for Connie, how Pepe and Tony scrambled to help Connie, or how Conchita Vidal tried to escape from all her controversial love affairs and find her own happiness. Wait, that sounded like what Connie did. I could not figure out whom the story was about. The plot was dragging. I felt dazed from all the flashbacks of the characters¡¯ lives that I lost track of how the main story was progressing. They slowed down the progression of the story. I am not saying including flashbacks in the plot would make it move at a snail¡¯s pace, but the author should have considered the flashbacks¡¯ lengths. They were long enough to be considered as short stories.
             The novel failed even more with its characters. They were uninspired, unbelievable, and, like the plot, confusing. Almost all o
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