I really couldn't get into this book...so much family drama and not really a good story.

My book club read it....some liked it, but most didn't. It was pointless if you ask me.

I did like translating the Spanish since I do speak Spanish, but other than that I did not like it at all. ( )

I'd give this good 3.5 stars if I could. I read Oscar Wao right after Middlesex (which I didn't like much) so I was a little wary of another immigrant-family saga. I have to admit I was frustrated at times by the amount of untranslated Spanish throughout the book and definitely recommend www.annotated-oscar-wao.com for notes & translations. By the end of the book, though, I was enjoying the read & had fallen in love with Oscar, that poor, hopelessly dorky, eloquent, beautiful boy. Zafa. ( )

Reading this book was an interesting experience.
Imagine living in a foreign country where you don't speak the language. You're really excited about a movie coming out and finally it does, and you go to see it in a VO theatre, so that it will be in English and just subtitled in the foreign language. Well, it turns out that 1/4 of the movie is actually in that foreign language, and, of course, since you're in a country where the language is spoken, there are no English subtitles for you.
The movie is awesome and you totally love it, but at the same time you know that you definitely missed something since there was a good 1/4 of the movie that you didn't understand. You could just see what was happening.
Well, that's how I felt reading this book. I absolutely loved it; the narrator was hilarious and interesting and exciting. He had an absolutely depressing and devestating story to tell, and he just jumped right in as if it was any other normal ole everyday happy story.
Oscar Wao himself was a totally likable character that you couldn't help but love but for whom you also couldn't help but feel sorry. Sometimes I wished I could be there with the narrator, pushing him in the right direction, urging him to do things just slightly differently.
His sister and his mother, while slightly less developed characters, were also exciting to follow. They were both just a little bit more than the average Dominican woman. They both had just a little something extra to add to the table, and, in their own way, their stories were just as fascinating as that of Oscar.
But still, this said, I couldn't help but feel that I was missing some basic elementary knowledge needed to really fully understand everything going on.
First of all, there was a lot of Spanish used - phrases and words that I just didn't understand. I'm learning Spanish, but I'm not quite there yet. And massive amounts of Dominican history were referenced without ever actually being explain. Maybe it's just me, but I never took a class on Dominican history. I also never took a history class in which we learned about Dominican history. So did I know that the United States had occupied the Dominican Replublic more than once? No. Did I know who Trujillo was before starting this book? No. Did I have any clue why Trujillo was constantly referred to as the Failed Cattle Thief? No. (Do I now? No.)
Do I feel that knowledge on these subjects (and many more) would have contributed vastly to my enjoyment and understanding of this book?
The answer to this question is a whole hearted YES!!!!
I mean, I really feel like I should go take a class on the Dominican Republic (where I have actually been) and its history and then read the book all over again.
None of this changes the fact that this book was beautifully written and heart-warming and heart-wrenching.

Overall, I have to say that I was a little disappointed by the book, but I believe that was due to all of the hype surrounding it.

Some things I didn’t really like about it: There were points where I was confused by who the narrator was, just when I thought I had figured it out there would be a passage that made it seem unclear. The chapter that gave the background of Oscar’s grandparents I found a bit slow and drawn out, though it was a necessary part of the story and couldn’t be skipped over. While I enjoyed the footnotes because of their added information and unique style, I found some of them to be a bit long and tedious.

Things I did like about it: Oscar. Lola. The interaction between Lola and their mother, I hated Beli, but I loved her at the same time. The fact that it won the Pulitzer, it shows how America today is much different than the America thirty years ago. I learned a lot about the Dominican Republic, and am thinking about picking up a history book. (Weird!) The Spanish, M is fluent, so whenever I couldn’t figure something out, I referred to him. ( )

Reviewed by Brett Kirkpatrick (Language Arts)
This book is about the immigrant experience, about shaking off curses, about the ability of love and self-determination to conquer all obstacles, especially Dominican Gangsters. It's about a Dominican kid who doesn't know how to get with the girls. He's a brilliant comic book geek who lives inside his head. This book has the best voice (more than one narrator) that I've ever heard. The voices are fresh, they're street, they're compassionate and complex. My boy, Oscar Wao, will school you in the ways of love and Star Trek. He'll teach you about Santo Domingo. You'll marvel at his wondrous life and wish it weren't so brief. ( )