"Thank you to Net Galley and Flatiron Books for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Sometimes I come across a book at just the right moment, like the author wrote FIN on the last page and slid the unedited manuscript under my doorway. Other times, I can appreciate the work of an author, but am not in the right mindset to fully immerse myself in the story. Unfortunately, I felt more of the latter with Olga Dies Dreaming. I think I need to read some Flannery O'Connor or Toni Morrison to reset my palette after all these contemporary books.

Olga Dies Dreaming has all the elements for a successful novel: two compelling, complex main characters, solid writing, and overarching political/cultural themes that the characters navigate in both their work setting and personal relationships. I'm sure those elements will resonate with a lot of readers, as they should.

I found myself...bored. It's hard to overcome the feeling of boredom and enjoy a book, no matter how much respect I might have for a particular passage or development of a singular character. If you're bored, you're bored, and short of lying to yourself, there is little enjoyment to be had.

I found the pacing to be poor, the summary-to-scene ratio askew, and the jokes try-hard and cringey, like someone wearing a leather jacket that everyone knows they can't pull off. The dialogue was predictable. Worse, the little missives about gentrification could have been lifted from a book from 1995 with no changes, a seemingly astute political point that is actually just the laziest observation one can make. Because this book is set in NYC, the characters are legally mandated to grapple with the question of "authenticity," an intentionally vague concept that is impossible to define, outside of the understanding that it only exists in Brooklyn."