Olga Dies Dreaming, by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron Books 2022)
First line: “The telltale sign that you are at the wedding of a rich person is the napkins.”
I finally dove into my first backlist Book of the Month pick of 2022 and it did not disappoint. I first selected this book because I’d heard it got picked up for series with Aubrey Plaza playing the protagonist Olga, and Jesse Williams costarring, and that pairing intrigued me. What I found in these pages was a book unlike any I’ve read before, a huge mash-up of genres all spiraling around the titular Olga, a Nuyorcan wedding planner for the elite and her brother Prieto, a congressman representing their hometown of Brooklyn, in the months leading up to and following Hurricane Maria in 2017. In different authors’ imaginations, this book could have been a hundred different things: a contemporary romance, a family drama, a disaster story, a rich-people-behaving-badly story, a political corruption novel, a revolutionary epic… but the Olga presented to us by author Gonzalez blended all those things into one.
Some reviewers have commented that all the story lines made for too much chaos, and I agree that it felt a little hard to focus at times because there was just so much going on. But for me, I think the chaos accurately depicted a character’s complicated life, one that is riddled with past traumas, current struggles, and hopes for the future. Yes, Olga and her family have a lot going on, but don’t we all? If you were to summarize your life story, could you? Additionally, Gonzalez’s writing is excellent, blending great conversational dialogue, often in Spanglish, and really profound prose at other times. I was taken in by Olga, and fell in love with her messiness. I can’t wait to see her portrayed on the small screen in the tv adaptation.
She Can't Stop Reading 