The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Winner of:
The Pulitzer Prize
The National Book Critics Circle Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize
A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who--from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister--dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú--a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere--and risk it all--in the name of love.
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Community Reviews
I felt that this was really just all over the place. It had the bones of a great novel but the switching character focus and time jumps just really did not flow well, and the footnotes felt like a chore to get through and added to the disruption of the narration. It's clear that Diaz has some fascinating observations about immigration but it really seemed to me that the structure of this novel was hindering these observations from being properly expressed.
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