It’s Saturday night – the baby is fast asleep, and home chores are done.  Or better yet, you have complete solitude because the house is all yours; everyone is out and the baby is with the grandparents.  Ahhh!  At last. Your much needed “I can totally relax time“ has arrived.

Get ready to sit quietly on the couch with a fantastic book, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz.

The author takes his readers on the life journey of an overweight Dominican teenager, Oscar de León, who lives in a single parent home in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar de León did not have the “stereotypical” Hispanic swagger; he had absolutely no game.  He had the worst luck with women and was either misunderstood or ignored because of his weight.

“Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.  High school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were.”

The book is filled with funny and surprising moments, where you don’t simply smile, you actually laugh out loud – hysterically!

“Senior year found him bloated, dyspeptic, and, most cruelly, alone in his lack of a girlfriend.  Oscar, Lola warned repeatedly, you’re going to die a virgin.  Don’t you think I know that?  Another five years of this and I’ll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me.”

“His two nerd boys, Al and Miggs, had, in the craziest twist of fortune, both succeeded in landing themselves girls that summer.  Miggs was an even bigger freak than Oscar.  Acne galore and a retard’s laugh and gray fucking teeth from having been given some medicine too young.”

“In December, after all his college applications were in (Fairleigh Dickinson, Montclair, Rutgers, Drew, Glassboro State, William Paterson; he also sent an application to N.Y.U., a one-in-a-million shot, and they rejected him so fast he was amazed the shit hadn’t come back Pony Express) and winter was settling its pale, miserable ass across northern New Jersey.  Oscar fell in love with a girl in his S.A.T.-prep class.”

Aside from the momentous humor, Diaz touches on the challenges of being a grossly over-weight teenager and Dominican-American.  He uses an interesting mixture of  languages; English and “Spanglish.”  At first you may not understand, but the author gives just enough hints to convey the meaning.

Diaz, not only focuses on the main character, Oscar, but discusses in great detail other key characters in the book whose past indiscretions later impact the main character’s life.  There is poignancy in his description of  the brutal past of the mistress to a notorious gangster.

“Trujillo would incur a fuku most powerful… if you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fau, a hurricane would sweep your family out to sea.  And what about fucking Kennedy? He was the one who green-lighted the assassination of Trujillo in 1961, who ordered the CIA to arms to the Island. Bad move, cap’n.  For what Kennedy’s intelligence experts failed to tell him was that whoever killed Trujillo, their family would suffer a fuku so dreadful it would make the one that attached itself to the Admiral Jojote in camparison…which explains why everyone who tried to assassinate him always got done.”

The “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is definitely a summer must read – the story comes alive immediately after the first line of the book – making it difficult to put the book down.  It’s no wonder why the author, Junot Diaz, was awarded a Pulitzer for his work and his book, a national bestseller.

The book is available at most bookstores for $10 – $12 a copy.  If you are “green-conscious,” checkout the book at your local public library.

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