NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK · WINNER OF THE BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY PRIZE • INTERNATIONAL LATINO BOOK AWARD FINALIST A blazing talent debuts with the tale of a status-driven wedding planner grappling with her social ...

We really didn't have anything positive to say about Gonzalez's take on Puerto Rico and Brooklyn. To give points where due, Gonzalez does paint a vivid picture of different parts of Brooklyn and most importantly, the story she's telling about the colonial history of Puerto Rico is critical and thorough. Between those two topics, there's a very important book that should be written. This book is not it, however. Gonzalez goes wrong on just about every other level. First, the relationships in the book make no sense. The main character Olga has romantic relationships that just seem atrocious - people behave in deeply self-absorbed or borderline ways without sense that these relationships are problematic, let alone being interrogated. Olga's arc through wedding planning to her eventual embrace of more progressive politics was also unbelievable. Do you actually sleepwalk into such an intense job? Can a character that has insight on other things be that blind to her own issues with her job? The plot of her brother is just plain insulting. Prieto's struggles with his sexuality just feel profoundly anachronistic. It's not that he can't have a closeted identity or have conflicted, but he's in his forties and he's a politician for a living. The idea that Prieto would not understand that NYC was in a more accepting place is just untrue and the scene where his daughter just dismisses all of his deep fears with a casual it's-all-good handwave is stunningly cruel. I'm sorry -- is Prieto someone we're supposed to feel sympathy for? Is he an idiot? The pieces just don't add up here, and as a result, it just feels like a cheap take on real trauma that doesn't make sense in contemporary NYC. There are similar issues with just about all the characters -- the room full of rich people decided the future of Puerto Rican solar power is a laughable caricature of how meetings like that go. But the biggest issue is the way Puerto Rican history is handled. Gonzalez is trying to use a fictional revolution plot to expose the much-ignored colonial history of the island. While we felt that it was great to be confronted with the problematic and oppressive parts of that story, the fact that Gonzalez mixes fiction into it makes it really hard to know what history to trust. For example, we know the Young Lords were real from prior education, but given that there's a not-real activist movement in the book, how would we know if Olga's mother's past was based in reality or not? Are there large solar cells on the island? Is there a current movement for independence, and how strong is it? The choice to mix fiction in so freely means that as non-experts on the topic, we actually don't know what's real and what's not, and that means that the power of hearing the stories of Puerto Rico is diminished by our questioning of what's real. It's a shame. A book on this topic is something we really welcome. It's just that Gonzalez fails to deliver believeable characters, real relationships, and a clear version of that history in this novel.