'Olga Dies Dreaming': Fiction

Don't be fooled by the wedding napkins. Xochitl Gonzalez's debut novel is a deep dive into family, secrets, identity and politics.

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Another visit to the library, another “Lucky Day” find: This time it was “Olga Dies Dreaming,” the fiction debut of Brooklyn author Xochitl Gonzalez, which I’d put in my book queue after seeing it on the reading list of a book club that I follow on Instagram.

When we first meet Olga Acevedo in June 2017, she’s a wedding planner to Manhattan’s elite, quietly plotting to pad a client’s order for luxury linen napkins so she can keep a couple hundred for herself. It’s not as if the client is going to notice or care about the discrepancy. And Olga is going to put those napkins to good use, at the wedding of a cousin with whom she has a love-hate relationship, where they will send a clear message about Olga’s status.

Olga’s brother, Prieto, moves in the same rarefied New York circles as a U.S. congressman, publicly proud to represent a Brooklyn district that includes the mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood where he and Olga grew up. But like his sister, he’s not quite on the up-and-up, though he’s got a different approach to skimming from the top and maintaining his status.

As for their parents? They’re two more big secrets. Papi used street drugs, contracted HIV, and died of AIDS. Mami left years ago, choosing radical political activism over raising progeny. Through her character, Gonzalez reflects on how Puerto Rico’s status as a second-class territory (Olga’s parents named her after Puerto Rican liberation activist Olga Garriga) resonates in the siblings’ lives.

Gonzalez sets this swirl of family, secrets, identity, and politics during the months surrounding Hurricane Maria, the most devastating storm to hit Puerto Rico in more than eight decades. It was refreshing to read a novel that so deftly balanced intimate family relationships with big political ideology, and I was delighted to learn that Gonzalez is now working on a pilot for Hulu, with the wonderful Aubrey Plaza (who is part Puerto Rican) in the lead role. Best wishes to them.