With this spirited, ambitious follow-up to his critically acclaimed short story collection Drown, Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz secures himself a place as a major new talent on the literary stage. The central characters in this wise, funny, gleefully unconventional debut novel are three young Dominican-Americans growing up in suburban New Jersey: the eponymous Oscar (nerdy and overweight, with a penchant for writing science fiction stories and an unfortunate habit of falling for the wrong girl), Oscar’s beautiful and rebellious sister Lola, and Lola’s womanizing but good-hearted sometime boyfriend Yunior, who is also the novel’s hip-hop spouting, proudly bilingual narrator. Making liberal use of footnotes, cultural referents, dialects, and forays into the history of the Dominican Republic that are at times pseudo-academic, at times inflected with colorful hints of magical realism, Díaz muses on the lasting repercussions of imperialism, the undying power of myths, and what it means to have a hyphenated ethnicity in modern America.
Book Review by Anna Ziajka
