The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
I thought as this started that it was going to be a novel focused on Dominican-ness for youth in New Jersey (a valuable trope, but not to my personal taste for fiction, no matter what -ness is the book is about) — but it became an epic multi-generational story about the Dominican Republic told through the story of a family ultimately focused on a single individual and his family’s history under a brutal dictator — with a third-party Gatsby-style narrator, Yunior, who apparently appears in Diaz’s stories, too. It drew me in much more than I anticipated.
Amy P. Knight 