Working for Rich People
The title character, Olga, is a wedding planner who caters to the super-rich elite of New York City. The opening chapter of the novel will immediately fill you in on what this means relative to her being someone whose main job is navigating stupidity. But a nice metaphorical phrase also does the job quite nicely and more efficiently:
“At every first meeting with a client there was one comment casually uttered that Olga filed in her mental Rolodex, knowing that, in several months’ time, she would spend hours or even collective days dealing with what had been a seemingly innocuous statement or question.”
Maria and MAGA
The title character and her brother are of Puerto Rican descent and most of the present-day narrative in the book is set in 2017 in the aftermath of the devastating hit the island took from Hurricane Maria. That actual historical event becomes the engine which powers Olga’s story into a period of conflict. Well, not just the natural disaster named Maria, but the unnatural disaster caused by the federal government’s response to Mother Nature’s fury:
“Two years after Maria, the island was ravaged by earthquakes and within seconds, the entire island was again in darkness. The people, realizing that their infrastructure was still as fragile as their citizenship, were exhausted of being held hostage to this ineptitude.”
The Congressman
Olga is not the only member of the family whose main job requirement is navigating the stupidity of the uber-rich. Her bother is United States Congressman who suddenly finds himself in political hot water with opponents. That hot water even earns him a metaphorical nickname:
“The op-ed was nothing short of scathing, raking him over the coals for canceling the PROMESA hearing, calling him ‘the toothless lion’ guarding Puerto Rico.”
Olga
Positive reviews of the novel consistently forward the title character as an example of the “tough empowered woman who has blazed her own trail and doesn’t take any guff” sort of literary trope. Interestingly, negative reviews commenting on the exact same characteristics portray Olga as simply being rude, selfish and manipulative. Who’s right? Well, let’s hear from one of the characters she deals with:
“He saw the words hit her like a slap and he liked it. He had forgotten how tricky she was. How many times had she done this to him? He had lost count. She always twisted his actions and desires into a version that best suited her”
The Karen but not “A Karen”
The present-day 2017 in which much of the story takes places was the year in which the term “Karen” exploded into the national consciousness as a negative metaphor for a certain type of privileged white woman. Interestingly, there is an actual character named Karen in the book who is always referred to as “the Karen” but for reasons standing in direct opposition to the behavior associated with the Karens made infamous on the internet:
“Abuelita would lament. `What happened? She met La Karen.’ Always the Karen, as though she was a force and not a person. Ironically, Karen had landed at the Catholic school for similar reasons as his mother. Her older brother was a Black Nationalist and her parents hoped the nuns might inoculate Karen from this same leftist path.”
