This January 2022 release features Olga, a Puerto Rican Brooklynite who works as a wedding planner to the ultra-rich—those who might think nothing of spending seven figures on a wedding. The juicy wedding details made for fascinating reading (and are rooted in Gonzales's real-life experience), but the emotional heart of this story lies with Olga's family of origin: their revolutionary father was a heroin addict who died years ago of complications from AIDS; their mother abandoned the pair when they were young so she could fight for Puerto Rican independence. Now 40, Olga finds herself restless with the life she's leading, her brother feels trapped for his own reasons, and the two find themselves torn between the success they've found and the ideals with which they were raised. This is a story about finding love and healing, breaking free from past hurts, and also very much about the past and present of Puerto Rico. I loved this, and found the ending particularly satisfying.

Olga Dies Dreaming author González returns with a fiery, campus-y novel set in the worlds of academia and fine art. In 1985, artist Anita de Monte falls to her death during a nasty fight with her husband, the prominent artist Jack Martin, whose fragile ego is threatened by Anita’s burgeoning success. Jack calls it an accident and carries on like nothing happened, but Anita is determined to make him pay. Flash forward to 1998, when Brown art student Raquel is preparing to launch her senior thesis on Martin, but gets sidetracked when she learns of Anita’s forgotten art—and suspicious death. Raquel admires the work and feels a kinship with its creator, another outsider in the art world. Raquel may hang with the white and rich Art History Girls, but as a first generation Puerto Rican college student, she can’t—and doesn’t want to—be mistaken for one. Plus the ways her own aspiring artist boyfriend’s actions resemble Jack’s are deeply unsettling. Smart and sophisticated (and more than a little sweary), this scintillating sophomore effort was everything I hoped for and more. Bianca Bosker’s nonfiction work Get the Picture would make a fascinating flight pick.

This delicious and gossipy tale explores the power of first love and the dark side of the American dream. I’ve been anticipating Gonzalez’s third novel since she hinted at her “gender-swapped Gatsby” in MMD Book Club in 2024. Here she drops her readers into 2007 Brooklyn, where 26-year-old Alicia moves to bide her time while her fiancé finishes grad school upstate. Her cousin Devon welcomes her to the neighborhood and introduces her to his wife, a bored woman of leisure. Meanwhile, Alicia is befriended by her neighbor La Garza, a larger-than-life fashion designer and the most gossiped about woman in Brooklyn. This friendship sets the group on a collision course with tragedy. I relished this bold, inventive, and oh-so-discussable literary reimagining. For fans of Gonzalez’s Olga Dies Dreaming and Rachel Khong’s Real Americans.