the_woman_to_blame 's review for:

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos

3.0

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I really wrestled with how many stars to give "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" by Oscar Hijuelos. There's a really compelling 250 page book written by a talented writer lurking in the almost 450 pages. The rest seems to be written by a rambling, prepubescent boy who's obsessed with his (and everyone else's) "thing" -- its length, girth, shape, color, hardness, vein pattern...you get the idea. (By the way, Mr. Hijuelos, the "thing" has a name...and you don't need to go into detail after detail about Cesar's, or Nestor's, or the Pepsodent guy's, or Delores's dad's. Methinks Freud would have a field day with you!) And the (poorly written) sex scenes were just plain excessive. Hijuelos writes like that one person we all know who has diarrhea of the mouth and is in dire need of a filter. (I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain a couple times.) I think a better title for this book would have been "The Mambo Kings Have Sex" or the more poetic "The Mambo Kings and Their Things". But like I said, there is a really excellent (and much shorter) book within these pages. To that book, I give five stars. To the rest of it, I give one star. (Where was the editor?!) Hence, my three star rating.

As a side note, I was extremely surprised to see that this book received a Pulitzer Prize. Really?! Makes me wonder why the committee didn't give one to that gawd-awful "Fifty Shades of Whatever".