vs.

The Hillcrest Team:
The winner is... Patron Saints of Nothing

The Weight of Our Sky and Patron Saints of Nothing both pivot on the coming of age characters who are dealing with tragic situations.  Randy Ribay's Patron Saints of Nothing is a powerful coming-of-age tale about 17 year old Filipino-American Jay Reguero, who goes to the Philippines to uncover the truth about his cousin's death.  Compassion, identity, and courage are important themes is this book.  The novel explores Filipino culture and history, specifically President Duterte's violent war on drugs.  The war on drugs is central to the story, and there are mentions of articles and descriptions of photos that depict some of the gruesome murders happening in the Philippines.  Jay must come to terms with the injustice of the violence visited upon the people, specifically his cousin, by the government, as well as the silent aggression of his uncle's house, where no one is to speak of Jay's cousins death. 

In The Weight of Our Sky, Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf places her protagonist Melati, a music-loving teenager afflicted with obsessive compulsive disorder, alone and directly in the line of the country's 1969 race riots.  This book deals with themes of identity, compassion and courage, but they are overshadowed by the all-consuming nature of the protagonist's OCD. Every decision Melati makes is met with demands from her tormentor, the inner voice she refers to as the Djinn, and she spends the bulk of her time counting to threes to prevent disaster, and the brutal death of her mother and loved ones.  In contrast, the actual death of her best friend, a fate she would have shared had not a bystander intervened, is spoken of in very little detail.  The constant references to her psychological condition becomes tedious, maybe the point of this fixation is to drive home the debilitating nature of OCD, but I found that it detracted from more salient issues in the story.