The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz, 2001
I'm not sure about this book. It wasn't at all what I was expecting. It left me feeling disappointed, because I had heard such great things and ended up being underwhelmed with the book, but at the same time I didn't really dislike it either. I thought the book was very well-written and interesting, but ultimately the title is misleading, because only about a quarter of the book is about Oscar. The rest is about his sister or his mother as a young girl or his grandfather. All Oscar's family, sure, but having very little to do, if anything, with Oscar's story.
The one thing that I really did dislike about the book, though, is that parts of it were written in Spanish. Sometimes dialogue, sometimes just a word or two, but it was in Spanish. It fit in with who the narrator was and made it sound like he was really speaking the story to you, which was almost kind of cool, but with a book that already made use of footnotes, why not translate the Spanish into English in a footnote? It makes no sense and alienated me as a reader.
Overall a decent story in general, but more as a view of an extended Dominican family and not of one individual, as the title and summary indicate. Just not as great as I was lead to believe.
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