A couple weeks ago I met up with some friends for dinner in Downtown Brooklyn. I had not really been to downtown since my high school days a decade prior, but not matter. I assumed I would have an easy time navigating from the subway to the restaurant - I would just use the Williamsburgh Savings Bank's clock tower as a massive compass needle, with Brooklyn Tech's spire and radio antenna as a backup, and use that as my north star. I had no such luck - apparently, in the past decade, skyscrapers had bloomed seemingly everywhere within a two-mile radius of the Barclays Center. My memories of a pre-Kyrie Irving downtown were useless, conquered by concrete kudzu.
It is in moments like this where I most appreciate Olga Dies Dreaming, the debut novel by Xochitl Gonzalez. I liked the novel a lot, despite its many flaws, largely because I am demographically obligated to - how could I not love this novel by a Mexican-American Bensonhurster, which claims to be dedicated to "South Brooklyn girls who stare at the water, dreaming," and then backs that claim up at least once per page for 400 pages? In heroine Olga Acevedo I see a mirror of my own strivings and failings. It is very rarely that I feel seen by a work of fiction with this level of precision.
Ergo, I was willing to put up with the shittier, didactic parts of the novel. So many of the secondary characters seem to talk straight past our protagonist and zero in on the reader, not so much speaking as orating, delivering multi-page lectures about Puerto Rican history for the sake of gringos on Goodreads for whom the greatest compliment you can give a book is "intersectional." Eventually, belatedly, these characters mostly become real people instead of The Jones Act for Dummies audiobooks. But not all of them, and especially not Olga's seemingly endless parade of lovers. I have seen Olga Dies Dreaming described/derided as "chick lit," which isn't wrong, naked misogyny aside. The book insists on the cover that it is A Novel but in my mind it is more of A Fanfiction, converting a century of Boricua radicalism into grist for love triangles. Which is only a negative insofar as that element of the book is so obvious - gee, will Olga fall for the white gazillionaire real estate mogul-slash-vulture, or the homeboy whose eyes and freckles merit a paragraph's worth of descriptors!?!?
And yet despite that cynicism I really did love the book, and its characters, and its lovingly chaotic depiction of a whole family ecosystem, and the parts where Gonzalez doesn't feel the need to explain la cultura to los blancos and instead just writes down the experience of walking down an ungentrified Sunset Park block for five pages. I even kind of loved the goofy fairytale ending. Great book. Four stars.
Wow, that was a lot of opinions. Anyway, here's a 5x5. It's times like these, when I forget to post the puzzle at the start of the week, where I'm glad I don't have these called "Monday Minis" anymore. There will actually be a new full-size QVXword this Thursday - a very lovely themeless which I got test-solved and everything! - and hopefully there will be more than one of them in the coming weeks. Love you all.
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