Last Night in Brooklyn is Xochitl Gonzalez’s latest novel and was published just this year. Like Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs Last, the focus of Last Night in Brooklyn is the Puerto Rican diaspora and the lives of Black and brown people in New York, but it doesn’t feel like a retread. It is an interesting story of the hedonistic lives of creatives living in a Brooklyn on the cusp of change.

Last Night in Brooklyn is set primarily in 2007 and is about a twenty-six-year-old woman named Alicia Canales Forten who spends a night out in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and changes the trajectory of her life. Determined to get out from under her Puerto Rican mother’s thumb, and unsure if she wants to marry her long-distance boyfriend, Alicia moves to the Fort Greene neighbourhood, and her life becomes a series of parties with glamourous people. Alicia also lives on the periphery of old-money Black families as the daughter of a wealthy Black man who got his Puerto Rican fling pregnant, even though Alicia does not seem to benefit much from her paternal relationship except for two weeks every summer spent in Martha’s Vineyard. While her wealthy relations drop millions on real estate and interior decoration, Alicia’s bank card is getting declined when buying a couple bottles of wine.

Alicia’s apartment in Fort Greene is across the street from the studio of the mysterious La Garza, an up-and-coming fashion designer who throws legendary house parties. One day, La Garza personally invites Alicia to one of her parties and Alicia becomes enthralled by her brazen confidence. But then Alicia’s married banker cousin, Devon, from her father’s side of the family, moves to Brooklyn and Alicia finds herself caught in the middle of La Garza and Devon’s tumultuous relationship.

I am naturally curious about other people’s experiences, so I was engrossed in the Great Gatsby-esque lives of the young Brooklynites of Last Night in Brooklyn, bright young things who are struggling to get by as they live it up before settling into careers and marriages. Alicia says she is “drowning in the era of self-absorption otherwise known as my twenties” but I find Alicia has a lot more sense and emotional intelligence than I did in my twenties. She is an engaging narrator who is honest with the reader even if she does not always know to communicate with the other characters. She just wants to figure out what she wants in life instead of having her self-worth tied up in a man, which is the tragedy of La Garza’s eventual downfall that is central to this novel.

Brooklyn comes to life in the pages of Gonzalez’s book. You can feel the excitement in the air with the buzz over the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, both harbingers of change in different ways, mingled with the threat of gentrification as investors, including Alicia’s cousin Devon, start buying up Brooklyn brownstones to replace with modern condos, the anxiety of the building of the Barclays Center, which eventually led to many Brooklyn homes and businesses being demolished, and the looming 2008/2009 recession. Three good books later, and Xochitl Gonzalez has become one of those writers who I will always look forward to reading their next book.