Radical Reads is an online book club focusing on literature that critiques and challenges current feminist topics. 

Join for a vibrant discussion of Xochitl Gonzalez's Olga Dies Dreaming, in which Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can't seem to find her own...until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long held family secrets.

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About the Book:

It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro "Prieto" Acevedo are bold faced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular Congressman representing their gentrifying, Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan's powerbrokers.

Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can't seem to find her own...until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long held family secrets...

Twenty-seven years ago, their mother Blanca, a Young Lord-turned-radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives.

Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Xochitl Gonzalez's Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife and the very notion of the American Dream—all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.

"The story’s driving tension derives from questions of how to break free: from a mother’s manipulations, from shame, from pride indistinguishable from fear, from the traumatic burden of abandonment, from colonial oppression, from corrosive greed. The book’s title is an allusion to the poem “Puerto Rican Obituary,” by Pedro Pietri, which contains the lines “Olga / dies dreaming of a five dollar raise.” But Gonzalez’s Olga will not go meekly to such a fate. Sometimes we must free ourselves — even from dreams." -Maggie Shipstead, The New York Times