Double Down!! It’s a review for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and Jesus Land by Julian Scheeres.

So I do this crazy thing where I’ll be listening to an audio book that will in someway echo the book I’m reading at the same time.  Like when I was listening to The Ghost Map, a nonfiction account of the cholera epidemic in London and YA gothic lite The Sweet Far Thing.  Both mentioned the muckrackers of Victorian London and how they eked out their life on the garbage and filth of others.  It was kinda weird to read two accounts of basically the same period. So is the some phenomenon with these two titles.

On the surface these books have little connection, Oscar Wao about a Dominican immigrant and his nerdy life growing up shunned by girls and friends alike and Julia’s memoirs of her adopted brother and their crazy religious upbringing.  I did start to link these two until Julia is sent to Christian Reform school in the Dominican Republic in the 80’s while Oscar’s story has as much to do with his family’s past under Dominican dictator Trujillo as his own experiences.  Where Oscar Wao’s voice comes from a ghetto and sometimes vulgar world, Jesus Land invokes the anger, fear and disappointment of a rebellious teenager.  But what really connects the two worlds is the underlying theme of families and their legacies.

What makes Oscar Wao such a big, epic, Lord of the Rings story is the included histories of Oscar’s cursed family, his martyred grandfather, his much abused immigrant mother and my favorite, his rebellious sister.  I love Lola’s story, possibly because the performer who read her was awesome, but also her story helped to explain Oscar’s more than the others.  Besides stringing the idea of shared curse the story also shows the legacy parents leave unintentionally to their children.  

Oppositely Julia’s story is more intimate and personal but no less moving.  The book is focused tightly on her and her brother David’s relationship.  As much as it is about their being raised devout Calvinist it is also about their struggles growing up in Indiana and dealing with racism they faced.  I found it amazing, reading this and also Oscar Wao, the damage and violence we can inflict on other people.  All for a cause or a leader or an escape.  The way people can be used and discarded.  It makes for very moving and heartbreaking reading.

An Awesome to both titles.  Wish I would have read Oscar Wao though instead of just listen to it.  I feel it is one of those fiction books that is not just read, but studied.