As she grows into a great and “terrible beauty,” boy-crazy Beli begins to catch the eye of the wrong type of men. With her dark skin and headstrong manner, Beli does not fit in at her prestigious private school. Beli lives with her aunt, La Inca, in Baní, a fairly poor neighborhood of Santo Domingo.

She adapts to life as a real “dominicana” and starts to come to terms with her tangled family history.įrom there, the novel goes further back in time to describe the adolescence of Lola and Oscar’s mother, Beli. Lola is sent to the DR to attend school and live with her great-aunt. She gets back in touch with Oscar, planning to meet him at a café, but their mother catches her there. However, living in a trailer with her boyfriend and his father is not the escape from her mother’s toxicity and illness that Lola imagined. The situation worsens when her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer and Lola decides to run away with her latest boyfriend. Lola’s strained relationship with her mother causes her to act out. The novel then switches to Lola’s perspective. Lola calms him down, and Oscar decides to wait until college to find a new love. Back in Paterson, Oscar becomes obsessed with a girl named Ana, threatening her abusive boyfriend with a gun. When he and his sister Lola spend summers with their great-aunt in the Dominican Republic (DR), Oscar realizes that he wants to become an author. Oscar pursues girls, but eventually retreats into science fiction, fantasy, and role-playing games. Yunior describes Oscar’s childhood as a Dominican American boy in Paterson, New Jersey, and the struggles that Oscar faces as he fails to fit in with the Latino community or get a girlfriend. The book starts by introducing Yunior, the fictional author of Oscar Wao’s biography, and the curse that has shaped the events of Oscar’s life. Yunior also adds footnotes throughout the book with humorous asides, stories of Dominican history, or quotes from other books that help illuminate Oscar’s life. Interweaved throughout, Yunior also tries to explain and understand his own failed relationship with Oscar’s sister, Lola, and the Dominican heritage that binds them all together. Told by Oscar’s college roommate, Yunior, the book also includes flashbacks into the lives of Oscar’s mother and his grandfather, as they suffered during the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic and finally came to America. The book shares the story of Oscar Wao (whose real name is Oscar de León), a Dominican American who never fits in with his communities, as he tries to assert his own identity and find love in the process.

Junot diaz the brief wondrous life