I just can't read Junot Diaz happily. I sluggishly finished "Oscar Wao" when that was published and decided to give this one a chance. But it's just too much work for those of us who (1) know zero Spanish, and (2) don't have any frame of reference for Dominican culture. How am I supposed to care about the characters & story if I don't understand every 8th word? I'm sure there's some awesome "point" to this book, but I can't get past chapter 2 to find out what it is. In short: I guess I'm too white for this book?

I read this simultaneously with one of Díaz's other books, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I enjoyed the latter much more (4 stars for that book).

This is a book of short stories. Taking a que from an admired reviewer and breaking this down a bit.

Several of the short stories have the same narrator, Yunior. Yunior also appears in Díaz's other novels.

The stories all deal with different forms of love, mostly in Yunior's life. He is obsessive in most of them and objectifies women to meet his needs. The last short story was the most appealing to me - it followed the trajectory of a cheating boyfriend and how all of that backfired on him physically, emotionally, and professionally.
As in Díaz's other work, his metaphoric virtuoso is on full display. A good, quick read, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao gets higher marks from this reader.

While I sort of appreciated the highlighting of toxic male masculinity and the way a male from a minority group may feel the pressure of societal and cultural expectations, I feel like a lot of this was unnecessary. (The graphic sexual encounters and especially Rafa and Yunior’s reactions to both the women in their lives, and to an extent their interactions with each other, just struck me as unnecessarily graphic and crude.)

I definitely do not understand the praise this book gets, but it certainly could be because this book was not for me as an audience.

excellent, and a breeze to read. Finished it in less than three hours. marvelous short stories.

Confused why Goodreads seems to confuse hating Yunior with hating the book. I felt moved and I liked the vignettes built around a character. I also liked the descriptions of women and how physical they were. Is it so wrong to appreciate a beautiful woman?? DO I SOUND LIKE A TOXIC MAN

"the half-life of love is forever". this would be cute if the person saying it hadn't literally cheated on his fiance and then cried about her leaving him as a consequence for the next three years.

the writing was good, sometimes. besides that, this was a flop. how am i meant to feel sympathy for a narrator who cheats, and then complains when his girlfriend doesn't want to be with him anymore? i thought maybe this would be a good insight into/exercise of sympathizing with a character who has made mistakes, but yunior is objectively just a terrible guy who does awful things to hurt women and then bitches about how "emotional" and "sensitive" they are about it. this book also paints women as desperate, overly dramatic, hyper-emotional cardboard boxes only there to reveal some greater point about yunior's childhood or relationship to his culture and family. yes, some of the description of his childhood and the influence of other deadbeat men in his life is interesting and at times sort of moving, but it all comes back to some elaborate implied excuse for treating women like pieces of shit. not a fan.

2.5 stars: The writing is good; didn't care for the stories.

Yunior from "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" resurfaces, and this time he's heartbroken. Several times. He's the link in the stories of "This Is How You Lose Her," and often narrates the stories in Diaz's latest work. Yes, Yunior cheats, is sexist, and often makes bad choices, but he still manages to be a sympathetic character.

This book is classic Diaz--raw, vulgar, energetic, funny, and sometimes written in Spanglish.