Happy first Friday of the Fall 2026 semester! We all deserve a break after making it through the first week of classes. Library Director Adam Pellman is here to tell us about a book from our fiction collection (yes, we have "fun books," too!), Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez.
This is a novel from our fiction collection that I’ve been meaning to read for a few years, and now I’ve made it a priority because the TV series adaptation will be hitting small screens soon, starring the incomparable Aubrey Plaza in the title role. Set in 2017, with snippets of letters written in years past to help fill in the characters’ history, the story centers on Nuyorican siblings Olga and Prieto Acevedo, who were abandoned by their mother decades ago when she migrated to Puerto Rico in support of a radical political cause. Olga is a successful wedding planner for Manhattan’s upper crust, while Prieto is a well-known congressman who splits his time between Washington D.C. and the Brooklyn neighborhood he represents. Their mother, Blanca, has kept tabs on them over the years, writing them letters but never attempting face-to-face contact. That is, until now, when Hurricane Maria’s catastrophic landfall in Puerto Rico has led Blanca back to New York to upend her children’s lives with all the force of the storm she left behind.
The author is a Brooklyn native, and writes with equal parts affection and concern for her gentrifying hometown. The novel is brisk and full of humor, and even a little romance, all while tackling serious issues like class, injustice, corruption, race, identity, and colonialism. The Acevedos are an endearing bunch, even the complicated Blanca, whose hard choices hammer home the idea that the love of one’s family is foundational, but a life spent helping the oppressed is an expression of love, too.
