I had very mixed feelings. On the one hand, the character is nuanced and deals with uneasy emotions and human relations. On the other hand, it feels performative. To what extent is Chang Rae Lee performing to the Asian American model minority stereotype, the quiet anguish, the gesture of domesticity? Who is the performance for?

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. It just seemed like everyone was drinking rum and hooking up all the time. At the same time, the author did a wonderful job of telling some of the myths and legends of the Virgin Islands and weaving them with the actual history of the land. Kinda reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Toni Morrison with the surreality of it.

McBride has done it once again. A tense, clever read that re-imagines grave history while still retaining a sense of dry humor.

While slow at first, it gets dramatic and intense, building to a great ending. I think the author manages to capture the invisible demands and tolls coming to a prestigious University has for some students, an alientation from their home communities that I have never seen displayed so delicately yet lovingly before.

Compulsively readable, loved the descriptions of the flavors and textures of life in Puerto Rico, the short static sentences that conveyed so much life and culture.

Much like my organic chemistry textbook, I kept reading in the hopes that this would make some kind of sense. It didn't.

While impressive in its scope and ability to show interconnections between science and politics in very different areas like reparations, the book could have been longer and substantiated more instead of using stories. It wavered between being a sociology book or a pop culture book and in the end, didn't really satisfy either.

I loved the intricacies in this book, the way the narrator herself seems to be sleepwalking between concrete now and the surreal past, all told with a wry, gossipy sense of humor that invites the reader to imagine an aunty telling this Bollywood-sequel drama on a boring June afternoon.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I think I did. It's a great contextualization for hip hop, because music rarely exists without being impacted and impacting the society it's created in and Chang draws really interesting, thoughtful links between anti-apartheid movements, globalization, anti communism interference by the US government and student activism and relates it all to hip hop. I just wish that he had taken time to talk more about feminism in hip hop (how can Lauryn Hill or Missy Elliot only get a sentence or two???) and about Southern hip hop instead of focusing solely on the East/West divide.

I'm continually impressed by Chang's ability to weave between different aspects of social life such as art and politics and present precise causations I could have never figured out. As a Cornell alum, the parts about the Willard Straight Hall Takeover and the Latino Studies Program founding were particularly interesting and useful to see in the context of broader race relations at the time. The presentation of the book, with beautiful and provocative photos, lends it a more art history type feel, though this book is of course much much more.