A review by lleullawgyffes
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

3.0

Díaz's writing is good, but I didn't like the book as much as I wanted/expected to. It suffered, I think from being (overall) Oscar's story, narrated by Yunior, rather than being about/narrated by any of the actually interesting characters in it — the strongest sections by far were the ones focused on Lola and Beli, and the ones focused solely on Oscar the weakest. The use of Spanish felt pretty natural to me, although sometimes it felt suspiciously like he was using it to be coy about throwing around homophobic slurs. Also, while overall most of the ~nerdy~ references were fine, there were times when they felt forced, like Díaz felt obligated to remind us that it was a book about a Nerd.

A very heterosexual book, all told. I had high expectations and this failed to meet them.
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