Honestly, I don't really know how to review this book. While this is a wonderful book about reciprocity and community, I fear I wasn't the target audience for it (in a good way??).

To me, the book is a more formal framing of what I've grown up seeing in my culture, something my family and friends have shown me countless of times, and what I continuously strive to embody. In fact, I'm a little put off to have a more "corporate name" to it, when it's just been a way of life as I've always known it. This is through no fault of the book, it's still addressing something important and crucial that we need to be reminded about. My 2.5⭐️ enjoyment is because I'm just maybe too Filipino for it, I guess, so I couldn't fully connect with it.

For Filipinos, we have this core value called "kapwa" which is a sense of shared identity, being-with-others, an inner self shared with others. It is the belief that your well-being is tied to mine. To think not only of yourself, but yourself in relation with others. My joy, my struggles, my healing is bound to yours, as yours is bound to mine. Whether or not I know your name, we are humans together — "kapwa-tao" (tao means human).

It's in the way my mom always buys food for security guards and front desk people at the condo. It's the way my parents kept us in a close, loving community of Filipinos when we moved to another country and we never had to worry about friends from Day 1. It's the way I know I will always have my Second Parents in my parents' friends/my friends' parents, even when my own parents have left us to go back home. It's the way this tattoo artist we had met 2 night prior, offered my cousin a free birthday tattoo when he found out it was his birthday, because it was 2 nights of chatting and connecting with him just because we had the time to do so.

In a way, The Serviceberry still highlighted the value of community, and the importance of the gift economy and reciprocity. Along with it, a reminder of my culture, our core values, and how they show up in my life.