LOCA by Alejandro Heredia is a very compelling read. I was hooked within the first three sentences. Sal and Charo's friendship feels deeply rooted and grounds the story in the way that only a long-time friend-family relationship can. Even when they annoy each other or are upset with each other, this duo feels anchored in the other's orbit. I really enjoyed Heredia's writing at the line level as well as at the overall storytelling level. This is one I look forward to using in a class soon.

À powerful and compelling debut from Alejandro Heredia. The writing is immersive, and the characters feel raw and real. The story explores deep emotions and identity with a fresh, engaging voice. While some moments felt slightly uneven, the overall impact of the novel is undeniable.

This book was really great. I loved the authors writing and description of events. It felt like I was living with them. I personally think it read almost like a saga even though it was told within a year. But it was so cool seeing the progression of the characters. I think the author created the characters with so much depth and detail and it was easy to get attached to them. I would’ve loved to have some of them as friends in real life.

The gorgeous cover art for this book 100% drew me in, and I'm so glad it did.

This amazing, honest, and tender debut puts Heredia at the forefront of new voices in contemporary literature. I loved spending time with these characters and the nuanced explorations of identity.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy.

The way this story was told really helped me to connect with both Sal and Charo. The first half of the novel is predominantly Sal’s story, as we see both his present life in New York City and the events leading up to when he leaves the Dominican Republic. In coming to the US, Sal is able to reunite with his mother and develop a relationship with the brother he grew up not knowing. He is able to be queer in a way he wasn’t back in the DR, but NYC in the late 90s still isn’t as accepting as you would hope. Charo has it all - a partner she loves, a beautiful daughter, and a job that allows her a bit of freedom. Things begin to change when Robert becomes controlling and eventually does something she cannot forgive. With the help of her new friends, she begins to realize she can have a life that’s different than the one she’s been dealt.

What I loved most about this was the found family element. Both Sal and Charo have their natural families, but the friends they adopt as family along the way is what makes this book truly special. In Sal’s DR chapters we see him coming into his own as a young queer man and connecting with the small, somewhat secret community. Renata takes him and Yadiel under her wings and helps them safely explore the queer scene in their town. These chapters were some of my favorites, even if they end up being some of the most heartbreaking.

I really liked reading Sal and Charo’s stories, and thought this wass a well written debut. I look forward to reading more from this author in the future.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster for a review copy.

A slow moving exploration of the immigrant experience for Dominicans in New York Sal and Chato. Each are running from things, looking for things, and finding the American dream to not be all they expected.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

Loca follows best friends Sal and Charo as they pursue their dreams in New York City.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I struggled at first with the way the book struck such an odd balance between Sal and Charo, with the narrative more Sal-focused to start and Charo coming in closer to the end, but ultimately I think this choice allowed me greater investment in each character individually than if they had been evened out throughout the story. I love a nonlinear narrative, too, and Heredia used that nonlinear structure to really highlight the thematic richness and nuance of the narrative in a way I'm sure I'll be thinking about long into the future. The story is intricate, careful, and heartfelt, and Heredia's writing is just spectacular. As a reading experience, this definitely required continuous, conscious engagement with the text -- it was not a book I sunk into so much as a book I pored over -- but it was spectacular nonetheless.

This book was so well written about the gay I. Life in New York City and s.A.N t o d o m I n g o. S a l is gay person who's coming out as a gay. Is friend c h a r o n they both grew up in the S a n t o d o n I n g o. Sal was raised by his grandmother because his mother left to go to new york. CHA RO was raised by both parents.But her father had an accident so her uncle got her to go to new york when she turned eighteen. Cell knew he was gay because he had a very good friend. But things turned out tragically for this person. So he left And went to new york to be with his mother and his half brother. Things were hard for him there. He couldn't get jobs and he kept going as best he could. Meets, a man who really falls in love out with his best friend. Go to a gay night club. CHA RO was having problems as well. Because she had a little girl named Caroline. But her husband named Robert was very controlling. Things got out of hand when caroline heard herself. I like how people make choices in this book.Because they had to but they Author did a really good job explaining this.
Like going back in time and then coming back into the fourth time. These two people had to find out who they really were. And I think it's so well written. How people have different conversations? And either gay or straight relationships. There is a happy ending to this book.And you will really be surprised how things worked out

I enjoyed learning reading about a culture I haven't read about before. I liked the author's writing style as well. I found that with multiple timelines and POVs, it was hard to stay engaged. There were also a lot of characters, many of who didn't appear until the last third.

"What's worse than leaving your life, your world, to begin again in a place that wants your working hands but not your culture, language, and history? Than living in this new place feeling torn in half, of two places but somehow from neither at once? Being an immigrant in this country is hard enough. But being a gay immigrant, he never gave that much thought until he got fired from the garden."

Sal and Charo are the best of friends, dating back to their adolescence in the Dominican Republic. Now they are both in the Bronx, dealing with their demons as twenty-somethings. Sal, a gay man, left a world of pain behind and moved to New York to reunite with his mother and the brother he had never met. He struggles to find and keep work and runs from commitment. Charo left her repressive home and mother in the DR to try to make her way on her own, and soon finds herself partnered up and with a young child. Neither of the two can seem to find peace, and this book is the story of their journey to do exactly that.

There are parts of this book that I really liked: Sal and Charo are interesting characters. Sal's life in the Dominican Republic as a gay teen is compelling and tense; Charo's life seems harder than it actually is -- and you want to shake her sometimes. But, the book is truly too long and veers off course, introducing new characters that really don't have much to do with the plot. The novel does take on a lot of the issues that immigrants face, which is quite timely. Also, watching the two main characters' evolution is satisfying. If only the book were shorter.

A novel of expats, love, legacies, and what the future holds for us when we're caught between clinging to the past we know while reaching for the possibilities of a whole new world appearing before us. Simply the best story of charting a path through life since "Countries of Origin" by Javier Fuentes.

Real Rating: 3.75* of five

"No matter where you go, there you are" meets "The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new." Socrates and Buckaroo Banzai in one sentence has to be a new record of weirdness even for me. When I read a book with Spanish and English side by side, I'm inspired to make connections. In my daily life I'm surrounded by Spanish-speaking folk, I grew up a denizen of La Frontera, I was taught Spanish in school...read my first foreign-language novel in junior high Spanish class...I am, in short, at home.

That is how this novel felt to me, like a homecoming. I'm upset that many of y'all will avoid the read like it gots the cooties *because* there's another language in it. Some because there's transgender representation. Some because it doesn't center, or to the best of my recollection contain, any wypipo. (Look it up.) Adding to the reasons I liked the read, and others won't, is New York City. That great cultural lightning rod with its century-old antisemitic epithet, its much-maligned by flyover country denizens Harlemness, that haven and home for Others. How that's a bad thing, honestly, is beyond my scope of imagination. I see it like Sal and Charo do, a place not to be defined by others but a place to do one's own defining. How can that be bad?

Sal, who provides the bulk of the narrative, is coming of age in a place as little unlike his home as he can bear. The Latine diaspora in New York City has enough cultural similarity and still enough cover to hide from the ugliness of his past. He's been traumatized, as a queer boy I don't imagine I need to spell it out for you how, and feels safer in New York. After all, it's harder to hate people when you don't know them, right? Disappearing into a crowd is safety?

Hmmm. Us oldsters are pretty sure that's fallacious already on first hearing but young people need to learn the hard way. Which explains in part why there are fewer old people than young ones.

1990s New York is the one I remember best. Things were changing and that's utterly ensorcelling to young people seeking personal change. The problem comes when the young person ignores the fact that change isn't a function of location, as Peter Weller memorably says in the clip linked above. Socrates (allegedly; at this distance in time, who really knows who formulated the thought?) elucidates the other issue Sal confronts in his desperate bid to change by escaping what he was told he was. It isn't until he meets a role model for his queerness who, like him, is a Black man but is also from the US, that he begins to *build* an identity not run from a label slapped on him...regardless of who's doing the slapping.

Charo might have the harder task. She does NOT want to be a punching bag for some man, in sexual slavery to him and a breeding machine for babies. Guess what. Moving to New York City on the cusp of a new century, a new millennium, doesn't change her less-obvious struggle any more than it does Sal's. Luckily for her, this is a soulbrother she's found, this is a connection they won't break. Sal is a role model for moving forward into being, into crafting, a new self. I expect these kids did just fine for themselves, and that is a great feeling to end a read on.

So why not more stars? Because, even though I get that the chaotic timeline with flashbacks and PoV changes is very much the way we live our lives in reality—complete with intrusive ruminations—fiction needs more order than life to work as a story. This book was, from the get-go, going to be more than one story with more than one main character. What happened was what so often does: One of the characters has more to say to the author than the other. It comes down to page-time. Sal's is the dominant PoV but we're more acquainted with him than really close friends, as a single PoV novel allows us to feel.

The truth is that's not a flaw when it's by design as it is here...we're apparently meant to feel we're conversationally getting to know a person's history and life events...but that carries an inherent issue of diminished investment in that PoV. When we don't focus hard on something, due to different kinds of interruptions in narrative flow, we don't necessarily get the same level of reward for our attention.

It's a braided-stories novel, a set of vignettes with beginnings and middles, whose ends we mostly know from their being flashbacks. It's a valid storytelling technique simply not one I love with the kind of passion I had to invest in this very involving set-up taking place in a world I knew, and remember fondly. So three and three-quarters of a star subjectively awarded.

Objectively I laud this debut novel by an author with a resonant voice, and encourage you to encourage him and his publisher by reading his book.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this novel. This is a late 90s/early aughts story of new Dominican migrants in NYC. Sal, a young gay man, and Charo, a new wife and mother, are struggling to adjust to their new lives and trying to escape the parts of their pasts that drove them away from DR in the first place. Through new friends, they learn to define themselves outside of the suffocating family and societal roles they grew up with. I especially loved the flashbacks to gay culture in DR, and the descriptions of Charo's family dynamics. As a character, Sal fell a bit flat, and his struggles were not as interesting as Charo's. The book skipped around between characters and time periods and lacked focus. I wish that it had been tightened up or perhaps turned into short stories. The author is a good writer and I enjoyed the book regardless.

Loca follows two twenty-something adults from their early years in The Dominican Republic to their lives in The Bronx and Pennsylvania leading up to Y2K. Charo is straight and Sal, her best friend and a science nerd, is gay. The author does a great job of tracking the difficulty of their lives both as immigrants and, for Sal, as a gay man. The description of the life of immigrants in The Bronx is particularly gritty and harrowing. They both work extremely hard at several low-wage jobs and money is a constant concern. Charo wrestles with the demands of being a wife and mother in a macho culture in the States and Sal joins Charo in The Bronx after fleeing the violent death of his best friend in the Dominican Republic. Sal and Charo's paths meet and diverge as each struggles to belong.

The book features a large cast of their friends and lovers The author digresses at a couple of points to give lengthy backstories on some of these secondary characters. I thought the writing was fine but the pacing of the book is slow and the two main characters seem to wander (emotionally and physically) until the final few pages when they make some important decisions to try to get their lives on track. There is really not much forward motion or build in the book. Both main characters make so many bad decisions that we lose a good deal of sympathy for them. They seem two lost souls who have difficulty communicating with their friends and lovers. I was very pleased to learn more about the particular challenges of Dominicans in the US by an own voices writer --even if I had to do a fair bit of translating.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

I was having a hard time putting my thoughts together to write this review, but I’ve now realized that it’s because this book just didn’t make me feel anything. Positive or negative, I felt nothing. It’s pretty rare for a book to leave my mind so blank.

I really don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with this book, though. The writing itself was good and I highlighted a number of portions and quotes while reading that I thought were either beautifully written or said something important about one of the themes of the book (i.e. race, sexual identity, relationships, etc.).

One issue I had was the way the book itself is structured. This bounces back and forth between present and past, which I typically enjoy in a novel, but here it feels disjointed and I frequently found myself lost. I wish there was some indication at the start of each chapter as to what year we were in so that I didn’t have to try to look for context clues so much. I was focusing on making sure I knew where/when I was instead of the story itself.

I’m glad I read this on my Kindle because there is a lot of Spanish. There are often full sentences in Spanish and I had to use the translator on my Kindle to make sure I wasn’t missing anything important. This of course makes sense because the two main characters are Dominican, but if you don’t speak at least a little Spanish, I do think you’ll miss some things.

I also, shockingly, didn’t feel much of anything for the characters. Their relationships to each other felt surface level. Sal and Charo are supposed to be best friends, yet there really wasn’t any point in this story where I could see, feel, or believe that. I was also looking forward to the found family element promised to me by the synopsis, but was left disappointed by those relationships, too.

Overall, this was fine. I would have liked to have felt more immersed in the story, more attached to the characters, but instead I felt I was held at arm’s length.

Alejandro Heredia’s Loca is a stunning and deeply emotional novel that I know will stay with me for a long time. The characters, their relationships, and the emotions woven throughout the story made this a truly special read. While it took me a minute to fully grasp the shifting time periods, once I settled into the rhythm of the narrative, I found myself completely immersed in Loca’s world.

This book takes on a lot—identity, queerness, immigration, and the experience of being Hispanic in the U.S.—and yet it never feels overwhelmed by these themes. Instead, Heredia expertly threads them together in a way that feels natural and deeply personal. The pacing is slow at times, but I actually appreciated that; it gave me space to sit with the characters and their emotions, to feel the weight of their experiences. Not much happens in terms of plot, but that’s part of what makes Loca so powerful. Sometimes, life is about the small moments, the everyday struggles, and the quiet realizations.

I loved this book for its honesty, its tenderness, and the way it lingers in your mind long after you turn the last page. Loca isn’t just a story—it’s an experience, and one that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for a chance to read this stellar eARC.

Loca by Alejandro Heredia is set in late 1990s NYC and with flashbacks to adolescence in the Dominican Republic. It follows Sal, a gay man, and Charo, his female best friend, as they both navigate what they want out of life and their romantic relationships. It really brought the experience of afro-Latinx migrants to life, and you gradually learn about both their motivations for leaving the DR in the first place. The book focuses a lot on the what it is that ties us to a place and what pushes us to leave (or to stay) - staying with the comfort of what’s known versus taking a risk on the unknown. I really enjoyed the parts set in the DR where you get to see the characters through their adolescent friendships and coming to terms with their gender and sexuality. I felt the narrative had more of a timeless quality, rather than being rooted specifically in the late 1990s (references to the millennium bug aside!). Overall, a really solid and engaging debut and I look forward to seeing more from this author in the future.

A thoughtful and thought provoking character driven novel about two friends making their way in New York. Sal and Charo have been friends since high school and it is this friendship that is at the heart of the novel. Both have challenges but they find solace in each other and the community they make. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. A very good read.

3⭐️ A queer story about two best friends who migrate to NYC from the Dominican Republic in search of a better life, only to be trapped by the very things they were running from.
I loved how queer this story was and some elements hit close to home.
I felt a bit overwhelmed by the multiple timelines, POVs and side characters, which ultimately made this feel overly ambitious and unresolved.
The overarching story about self discovery, found family and breaking free from expectation.
While I think this could’ve benefited from a more focused approach, I found it emotional and heartfelt.

I am a sucker for a great story set in NYC. Growing up as a Latina in the city at this time (I was in my 20s) in 1999, I am very familiar with the diaspora of Latinos at the time and in this place. Although, I am Puerto Rican, I am especially familiar with the Dominican diaspora having attended a high school where the primary Latino population is Dominican, and having Dominican family.

Reading this book was like returning home for me. Sal and Charo are reminders of the friends and family I grew up with and their story is truly representative of many I have know. The author accuracy with NYC atmosphere is amazingly accurate for the time.

Those who enjoyed books like How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water or Dominica by Angie Cruz and interested in the Urban Latino Diaspora, specifically diaspora I strongly recommend this book.

Thank you Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC. My opinions are my own.