Olga Dies Dreaming

384 pages

English language

Published Jan. 21, 2022 by Flatiron Books.

ISBN:
978-1-250-78617-3
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(6 reviews)

It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro “Prieto” Acevedo, are boldfaced 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 power brokers.

Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1 percent 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.

Olga and Prieto’s 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.

Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in …

6 editions

Review of 'Olga Dies Dreaming' on 'Storygraph'

What an engrossing and possessing book this is. I stayed up way too late finishing it. And still it took longer than I expected because, for someone like me who knows next-to-nothing about Puerto Rico (née Borikén), it sent me to Wikipedia a lot. But this isn’t a history lesson. It’s a powerful story of identity at the micro- and macro-level.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about literature is that it invites us to experience worlds, lives, ideas that are foreign to us. I can be a woman, a Puertorriqueña, member of a big Brooklyn family, daughter of a revolutionary, even though I am none of these things. But even so, I did not expect to identify directly with Olga in the way I did. Despite the vastly different circumstances of our lives, we both have complicated parents. And Gonzalez put to words things I’ve never really been able …

Enjoyable peek into a contemporary Puerto-Rican family in New York

Olga Dies Dreaming occurs in recent contemporary America, specifically within the Puerto Rican diaspora living in Brooklyn, New York, through the view of Olga and her family.

Olga was essentially raised by her brother Prieto and her grandmother. Her father was largely absent due to drugs, and then death. Her mother absent to be a revolutionary.

Olga tries to navigate life as Puerto Rican descendant within a rich white person’s world. Her brother is trying to represent Brooklyn in US Congress. Both experience mixed success, and always with the remote judgment from their mother, who shares her thoughts on their progress through untraceable letters.

Gonzalez touches on family, belonging, love, and abuse. She’s never particularly heavy-handed, and I feel that she realistically portrays struggles that descendants of minority immigrants face within contemporary America.

This was a book club pick, and a fairly good choice, in my opinion. I enjoyed it …

Review of 'Olga Dies Dreaming' on 'Goodreads'

Ambitious. Gonzalez packs a lot into her first novel: parental abandonment, U.S. colonialism, revolutionary politics, minority & women’s & LGBTQ rights, corruption, shallowness, economic inequality, love, forgiveness. It didn’t always work for me but it was a hell of a ride, and kudos to her for aiming high.

The story was compelling, even though there is little I find as shallow as elaborate weddings or people whose day can be ruined by the wrong napkins or colors. Somehow, here, I cared. (About the people. Not about the napkins.) The timeline progression was effective: JULY 2017 on the opening page, and every Puertorican reader starts getting chills: we know what’s coming. Then August, then September, everyone acting all normal, because what could they know then of Hurricane María, and that somehow makes the tension more painful.

The maternal epistles, though, interspersed throughout, they felt clumsy, like a quick tool to get …

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