Reviews with content warning for War - Olga Dies Dreaming

This is a somewhat heavy-handed, mostly enjoyable story centered on the familial, professional, and romantic/sexual lives of two siblings, Olga and Prieto Acevedo. Both siblings' adult lives are still deeply tethered to the traumatic childhood event of their mother, Blanca, abandoning them for various revolutionary causes in Latin America.

I think this story raised some really compelling points about the balance between one's external politics and the responsibility to live out those values in your intimate relationships. It shows the damage that occurs when people are working towards the liberation of entire countries of people while mistreating the people closest to them. In the case of the Acevedo siblings, this hypocrisy from their mother caused them to rebel against her political commitments, which they came to see as in conflict with their care and wellbeing.

Because Blanca is such a villainous character within her family (she is a condescending, selfish, manipulative, and also homophobic mother, daughter, and sister), it makes it hard for the main characters and the readers to fully buy into the aforementioned political commitments. Due to her being a deadbeat, she is only characterized through her children's memories, folklore from her devotees, and one-sided correspondence. This means that while Olga and Prieto get to be fully complex humans, we don't see much of the pure dedication Blanca had for oppressed people that caused her to leave her family. I was surprised Xochitl Gonzalez didn't make this choice, not only because she switches narrators quite liberally throughout the story, but also because including Blanca's POV outside the letters could've nuanced her (still inexcusable) treatment of her children.

Similarly, while I enjoyed the back-and-forth attention to the geographies of "New and Old" Brooklyn and Puerto Rico, the characters who threaten the futures of both places are also portrayed as one-dimensional villains. This is mostly due to lazy writing, and a lack of clear perspective on the book's ultimate political stance. For example, one of the main "good" characters ends up having the exact same exploitative occupation (a landlord) as the "bad" characters. I think Olga justifies this as okay because he still turns windfall profits, but doesn't displace people, but that seems misaligned with Prieto's earlier opinions about how the problems of tenant exploitation in their community started well before gentrification. This moral confusion continues when Gonzalez has one characters conclude that Blanca is no better than the disaster capitalists seeking to gentrify Brooklyn and occupy Puerto Rico, because they both exploit and use people towards their aims. This overcomparison is only possible because Gonzalez didn't really do the work to fully understand Blanca's deep ethical motivations to her causes. She's right that these motivations don't justify Blanca's means (particularly the manipulation of her children and nonchalant acceptance of human suffering), but she's wrong that her ultimate goals are the same as Dick and the Selbys wanting to further line their already-lined pockets.

My final gripe (and reason for not making this a clean 4-stars) is Gonzalez's creepy fascination with the skin colors of various characters in her book...we can tell that a white lady (regardless of ethnicity) wrote this!! However, I still mostly enjoyed the book and would recommend to others.

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