Book Review: This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

    Hey! Before we start the review, I want to address two changes that I've made to this blog.  You might have noticed that the blog's title has changed from "The Book Thieves" to "The Book Bum," while the web address has not changed.  I made this alteration because I feel like I've outgrown the old title, plus I think it's lowkey plagiarizing a book with a similar title?  So I picked a new one and I may change it again in the future.  I kept the web address the same because I'm not sure how changing it will affect the people who already follow this blog.  Will everybody be confused?  I'm not sure, so I'm keeping it for now.
     The second change is that, from now on, guest bloggers are welcome to write for The Book Bum!  If anyone is interested in writing a review, comment on this post or let me know in person.  My first guest blogger is my boyfriend, Elijah Logan, who wrote today's book review.

Elijah's Review  

Looking distinguished and cute asf <3

    Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her is an amazing piece of literature that captures the attention of the reader immediately and deals with emotional, physical, and identity based conflicts that are still applicable today in the Dominican community. The book is composed of 9 short stories that focus mainly on the character Yunior; a character from one of Diaz’s past books, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but also delves deeply into to the lives and emotions of secondary characters as well.  Diaz focuses on the main character Yunior, but also on the surrounding characters giving them 3 dimensional personalities and back stories that make them both relatable and hard to love. Diaz engulfs the reader in emotion by giving each story  a different temporal angle to adjacent events, making the reader feel a spectrum of emotions for them. For example throughout the book with the character Yunior I felt anger, sadness, hope and ultimately pity at the position of his life at the end of the book. Diaz does this by showing the reader the intimate relationships crumble over the course of his life due to him being a compulsive cheater. He does horribly insensitive things like cheating on one of his ex’s with as many as 50 women and then, when found out, claiming that all the emails from other women were just a part of his upcoming book.

    Yunior also goes through periods of the book where through self reflection, he realizes that it was almost in his genetic makeup to cheat on the women he loves, just like his father and brother did before him. He, like the main character of The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao, struggles with what he believes is his fate.  

      While almost all of the characters in the story are well developed, most are also morally ambiguous, which adds a sense of realism to the book.  For example,  Yunior’s brother Rafu has cancer and seems to be an insensitive, womanizing cheater who disregards the feelings of both his mother and older brother.  That is, until a flashback reveals Rafu to have been the only one who truly understood the pain his mother felt when they first came to America, before their father left. This persuaded to me to believe that even the baddest aren’t all bad, or at least haven’t always been.

    This is an amazing book that deals with so much that I could probably write my bachelors dissertation on it, but I’ll end by saying give it a read. It’s a great book and I'm sure you’d enjoy it.