Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives. Olga and Prieto's mother, Blanca, a Young Lord turned radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1 percent but she can't seem to find her own.until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets.

Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn, while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan's power brokers.ĭespite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro 'Prieto' Acevedo, are boldfaced names in their hometown of New York. Rarely does a novel, particularly a debut novel, contend so powerfully and so delightfully with such a vast web of personal, cultural, political and even international imperatives.A blazing talent debuts with the tale of a status-driven wedding planner grappling with her social ambitions, absent mother, and Puerto Rican roots - all in the wake of Hurricane Maria. with remarkable dexterity, Olga Dies Dreaming transitions temporarily into a political thriller about the way Washington and powerful business interests conspire to profit from the island’s suffering. Aside from a collection of winning characters and an ingenious plot, what’s most impressive about Olga Dies Dreaming is the way Gonzalez stretches the seams of the rom-com genre to accommodate her complex analysis of racial politics. If this is a novel about toxic family secrets, it’s also a novel about clandestine national schemes. Gonzalez develops a rich parallel story about Olga’s brother, Prieto. But it’s the tremendous verve of her prose that makes these pages crackle.

Presumably, Gonzalez is pulling at least some of these funny shenanigans from her own experience: She once worked as a wedding planner herself. She’s jump-starting the year with a smart romantic comedy that lures us in with laughter and keeps us hooked with a fantastically engaging story. In short: Don’t underestimate this new novelist.

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xóchitl González