Book Reviews

Olga Dies Dreaming

FLATIRON BOOKS

The fact that Aubrey Plaza will play the main character in an upcoming Hulu adaptation of Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming is the least interesting thing about the book.

Olga Dies Dreaming is everything a novel should be and more. In 369 pages, Gonzalez subjects us to curiosity, heartbreak, lust, intrigue and rage. What takes place in this novel is realistic. In fact, many of the events are lifted from real life. There are no forced happy endings here, just grown adults working through their trauma and learning to live with the hands they’ve been dealt. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Olga is a Brooklyn wedding planner for the 1 percent. She spends her days acquiring expensive napkins, organizing entertainment and catering to the ridiculous whims of her ultra-rich clients. And while her life seems put together on the outside, it really is far from it. Between dealing with her fugitive mother who abandoned her family to fight for Puerto Rican liberation when Olga was just a child, and mourning her late father who died of HIV, Olga has a lot on her plate. Not to mention being there for her closeted Congressman brother who finds himself constantly pulled between doing the right thing for his constituents and maintaining his public image.

But Olga is able to keep her head above the water until hurricane Maria strikes Puerto Rico and sends her world into a tailspin. How do you cope with the devastation of a place that’s in your blood but not below your feet? Is family actually everything? And when is it OK, if ever, to prioritize your own well-being when people are suffering?

Gonzalez does not take the task of writing about these complicated issues lightly. With every loaded question comes a loaded response that is perfectly executed by complex character development and a carefully crafted omniscient narrator. Gonzalez informs her audience about PROMESA, hurricane Maria and issues of Puerto Rican liberation in a way that is not heavy-handed. Instead, it provides context and encourages readers to do their own research on how these events actually took place outside of the world of the book.

Perhaps most satisfying of all is how Gonzalez makes us sit in the discomfort of microaggressions, class disparity and gentrification, but Olga and her family are not at all pitiful. In fact, they are complex humans that experience tremendous

Liminal: Shadow Agent Pts 1 & 2

GREYING GHOST

joy in the book as well as trauma. We celebrate their wins, we watch them show up for each other and we laugh along with them as they traverse a difficult world.

This debut is simply impressive. It’s informative, addicting and wonderfully engaging. I cannot wait to read more from Gonzalez and I wish happiness for Olgas all over the world.

Readers should be aware that this book includes sexual assault and violence. —Lily DeTaeye In the letter that author Jon Cone sent along with the first two volumes of his Liminal: Shadow Agent project, he calls the slim books “comic book scripts.”

They are, in a sense.

They tell a pictureless story of a superhero entering a fight against a great evil. The dialogue is called out with all-cap character names and is centered on the page. There are asterisks appearing periodically, perhaps to indicate panel transitions. There are even some captions noted, and there are direct instructions to an artist and letterer. But there is nothing here that could become a traditional comic as we know it. Dialogue far too extensive for a single panel appears in single asterisked sections. Scenes are filled with detail too precise for even a full-page panel; expressions described with more subtlety than could be conveyed.

In Part 1, Liminal, the hero, passes a comic book shop on the street. He doesn’t linger, but the view does, focusing on Hipster Theoretician and Hipster Friend conversing about the limits of the form. “You see the form hasn’t begun to be explored. No one’s done anything new since Kirby in the early ’60s.

The whole thing’s stuck, inert, dead!” says Hipster Theoretician. The character goes on to argue that comics should evolve to transcend speech, to be visual only. “Writers can make a contribution, sure, but the artist should always be king.” Cone’s work is this theorizing in the inverse. A poet by primary trade, he paints pictures with his words, guiding the reader nimbly and viscerally without actual imagery. These are not just comic scripts, they are already fully illustrated—just not visually. Cone is living in the space defined by his unsubtle heroic naming conventions: the liminal. This is a comic that both is, and is not. It exists in the in-between. Over the course of the two parts, this love letter to comic style echoes, upends and teases trend after trend from the early superhero and even pulp books that Cone grew up reading. Do the hero and his female support character, Base 39, have sex to activate the magic needed for him to enter another realm? Of course they do. Does WITH EVERY LOADED QUESTIOn the crucial confrontation with the villain begin at high noon? Could COMES A LOADED RESPOnSE it possibly do otherwise? Is there a THAT IS PERFECTLY EXECUTED cyborg battle? Yes, there’s a freakBY COMPLEX CHARACTER ing cyborg battle! Duh. The story is not inherently funny, but beat after DEVELOPMEnT AnD A CAREFULLY beat, Cone peppers in allusion after CRAFTED OMnISCIEnT nARRATOR. allusion, making it impossible not to laugh while reading. But the directions make this a script in the most Tom Stoppard-y way possible. They are not just instructions, they are meant to be read. They are their own literary form. “The lance, a huge heavy column, crushes Liminal’s body against the wooden barrier,” one reads. “Pinned like a Nabokov butterfly.” Cone may have been sincere that he intended to work with an artist on this, to turn it into a more traditional comic. I for one am glad that he didn’t.

—Genevieve Trainor