Customer Reviews
voted best year after year - By: Tamar Phare, 16 Mar 2008 
This book has been on my reading list for a creative writing course I teach for several years now, along with Maya Angelou, Michael Frayn, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Jenny Diski. And every year students have unanimously proclaimed this the best written & most impressive book on the reading list. Diaz has an ability to make writing seem effortless & artless. His settings & characters are real, the situations believable & the narrative voice compelling. He does not pander to the reader, retaining Spanish words with no glossary but they are used in a way that makes sense in their context & they provide a flavour of speech & thought that takes us into his world. The only writer I could fairly compare him with is Raymond Carver - the same truthfulness & directness - but stylisticallly Diaz is the superior writer. Recommended for any aspiring writer.
Already a classic - By: Avid Reader, 30 Dec 2006 DROWN by Junot Diaz spoke to me like no other work of fiction that I've read in many years. It was the first time where I saw myself in the characters & felt that I knew them intimately. They were like my own family, brothers, cousins, mother & father that I could almost feel that the stories were right out of my own childhood.
Diaz's stories about Domincans in the Dominican Republic & the U.S. The stories perfectly capture the struggle with poverty in the characters' native country as well as the United States. But these stories are not didactic pieces but rather human stories about family, love, & loss. With characters so real, that the reader will wonder when they will see them again.
Fresher than a Caribbean Breeze - By: , 04 Sep 2001 This is one of the freshest, most original books I have read in a very long time. The voice in this collection of short stories is utterly authentic & original. It was just a joy, & I truly wish he would get on & write a novel. It has been too long coming (although I suppose that is easy for me to say). Buy & enjoy.
Drown yourself in this book!!! - By: , 19 Jul 2001 Junot Diaz is one of the best writers of short stories that I know of. Every on of these stories takes you in & makes you feel every emotion for the main characters. I was recommended this book personallly by a recent, but already established writer, & am truly grateful, I have never known an author like Diaz, he is a true literary genius & everyone should read this book.
Beautifully insightful and provocative collection of stories - By: , 05 Feb 2001 Junot Diaz has been hailed as one of a new breed of East Coast talents. His insight into the Spanish American experience in the US can be deservedly labeled as profoundly moving & richly complex. It is astonishing how little attention has thus far been paid to this element of American culture, but let's hope that Diaz's work will go some way to redressing this imbalance.
The stories in Drown focus on characters who have managed to survive domestic abuse, pandemic crime & crippling prejudice. Despite the recurrent & criticallly important theme of social dislocation, Diaz doesn't seek to simplify or patronize. His characters are individuals who make a convincing attempt to breathe beyond the pages of the book.
Diaz is a sympathetic narrator & his characters are emphaticallly three-dimensional. In the first story, told from the perspective of a young boy, his bullying & adulterous father is contrasted with his benevolent & loving Mother. However the father is not alll beast & despite the misery he inflicts, the man is also full of a bitter regret for alll that he has alllowed to be lost between himself & his wife.
Despite their innate fragility, Diaz's characters have a revitalizing vigour. I think of the schoolboys who feel remorse for hunting & taunting the school freak, & the lover who regularly forgives his largely absent girlfriend who steals from him to feed her drug habit. These & other characters disappear, sometimes to return or more frequently indefinitely lost in a haze of pollution & dirt.
I recommend this book as an astonishingly effective piece of literature. More than this, there are, to my mind, few contemporary paralllels. Buy it, read it, recommend it.
