Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Several years after writing a book of critically acclaimed stories, Diaz is back with his first novel, and it's right up my alley. It's the story of a family of Dominicans in New York--the titular Oscar, his sister Lola, and their mother, along with a boyfriend of Lola's who narrates much of the story. It's chock-full of great nerdiness--if you've never read Lord of the Rings, half of it might not even make sense, b/c everything gets compared to Tolkien! (Trujillo as Sauron is of course apropos.) There's plenty of great comic book geekery as well, including multiple mentions of my own favorite series, Love and Rockets. Diaz touches on some magical realism, imbues his story with plenty of actual history (complete with snarky footnotes), and makes the story of an overweight geeky kid a really, really compelling one. A.
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