Title: Olga Dies Dreaming Author: Xóchitl González
Published: January 4, 2022
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 384
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro "Prieto" Acevedo, are bold-faced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan's powerbrokers.
Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can't seem to find her own...until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets...
Twenty-seven years ago, their mother, Blanca, a Young Lord-turned-radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives.
If you are seeking the pure cathartic joy of reading a book where the main character tells Donald Trump that she hopes “the ghosts of every Puerto Rican who died at your hands in this catastrophe [aftermath of Hurricane Maria] haunt your dreams each night, dancing an all-night salsa party in your twisted mind,” please look no further than Olga Dies Dreaming.
Come to watch the 45th president get read for filth on live television; stay for the jaw-droppingly complex interpersonal dynamics that form the heart and soul of this novel.
Not going to lie, I did not expect this book to be particularly good. At first glance, Olga Dies Dreaming appears to be about two relatively privileged gen-X Nuyoricans: a wedding planner and a congressman. I expected the narrative to be bougie, veering towards Women’s Fiction, and with shades of the Lin-Manuel Miranda style of “Puerto Rican identity” that liberal white people love but is actually rather cringey.
Turns out that Xóchitl González is not interested even slightly in white people feels or in anything but the most in-your-face portrayal of Latinidad. This is a book that’s loud and aggressive, systematically exposing hypocrisy, oppression, and violence at every turn. Olga Dies Dreaming digs up racist microaggressions with a heavy-duty shovel; simultaneously, it unearths macroaggressions with a backhoe and a professional excavation team. Not even Lin-Manuel is spared!
This book is a lot. The narrative is emotionally heavy from almost the first page. On one hand, I was expecting to be outraged by the United States’ horrific bungling Hurricane Maria and its aftermath (Anecdote: the number of blue-tarped roofs I saw when I flew into San Juan a full year afterwards was fucking criminal.) On the other hand, I was not expecting to get constantly assaulted by the all-too-relatable centerpiece of the story: Olga and Prieto’s toxic, manipulative, selfish mother. Nobody does family dysfunction like Latinos, which González clearly knows.
“Renae, what is this book even about?” you ask. I even don’t know! I came for a sort-of-maybe love story about a wedding planner from Brooklyn, and instead I found an unflinching political thriller with sharp teeth, from a perspective the establishment desperately pretends does not exist.
Olga Dies Dreaming is astonishingly effective in the way it balances and intermingles all of its themes. González doesn’t shortchange either the “big picture” discussion of neocolonialism and oppression in Puerto Rico or the “small scale” portrait of a poisonous mother who has wreaked havoc upon her children’s mental health. In fact, both of these topics are so intertwined that they form a seamless whole. This book is so deeply insightful that it hurts, and it’s so angry about injustice that it hurts even more.
This is a horrible, chaotic review of a very good book. I absolutely demand that Olga Dies Dreaming be recognized as one of the best books of 2022. Yes, it’s only January. No, I will not be taking questions at this time.
