A woman writer of color treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings — she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity.
Mona [...] leans wholeheartedly on crime fiction. Oloixarac is an exuberant genre-blender ... Mona reads like Rachel Cusk’s Kudos on drugs ... Mona is, for example, both resilient and hedonistic—or rather, she’s resilient through hedonism ... Mona’s theorizing could put some readers off, or make them long for Elmore Leonard’s snappy, comic crime writing ... But the novel’s headier passages nonetheless do important work, helping Mona slowly explain to herself, then accept, her complicated reactions to her rape and her vulnerability as a woman. This nuanced acceptance helps Mona succeed. So does Oloixarac’s genre-mixing, which leads to originality of thought and technique. If her novel’s abstractions are extremely literary, its acknowledgment that total safety isn’t achievable owes a debt to generations of crime fiction.
There are provocative presentations on the state of literature; erotic interludes; and drunken proclamations about the nature of art—all tied together by nothing more than Mona’s memories and desires. It ends with a truly out-of-left-field sequence and a brutally intimate revelation that doesn’t feel wholly earned by the 200 pages that precede it. Lucky, then, that Oloixarac is so damn funny and insightful that Mona is rewarding nonetheless ... This may be a structurally minor work compared with her previous novel, but Oloixarac has profound things to say, and a great many of ways of saying them.