Last Night In Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Publication Date: April 21, 2026
Format: Hardcover - 256 pages
Audiobook - 7 Hours 37 Minutes
Kindle - 237 pages / 3.8 MB
Nook - 352 pages / 4 MB
ISBN (Hardcover): 978-1250372031
ASIN (Audiobook): B0F9MNKKRZ
ASIN (Kindle): B0F3WJLS45
BNID (Nook): 978-1250372048
Genre: Literary Fiction
Buy The Book:
Description: I purchased a hardcover edition of this book from my monthly Book Of The Month (BOTM) subscription. The book review is from my honest opinion.
Book Description:
New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a captivating story about a young woman whose life becomes ensnared in her glamorous neighbor’s secret past
SPRING, 2007
At twenty-six, Alicia Canales Forten feels smothered by her future. She’s in a long-distance relationship, living at home with her mother’s beliefs, saving up for her wedding to a future doctor. But after Alicia ventures out one night in the neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she finds herself lured by the siren song of youth and possibility that the striving crowd of creatives holds, and moves in.
No one embodies this milieu more than La Garza, a larger-than-life, up-and-coming fashion designer whose epic house parties fuel neighborhood lore. La Garza’s life, observed by Alicia from her apartment across the street, seems to hold the allure and fearlessness Alicia has never dared to imagine for herself.
But when Alicia’s wealthy banker cousin moves to the neighborhood, she finds herself increasingly drawn into both his and La Garza’s precarious lives.
Against the backdrop of a potentially life-changing presidential election and a looming once-in-a-generation fiscal crisis, Last Night in Brooklyn explores the dark compromise of the American Dream for people of color living, unknowingly, in the twilight of a cultural moment. It is a story about everything money can buy—and the destruction of what it can’t.
My Book Review:
Last Night In Brooklyn by author Xochitl Gonzalez is an intriguing story of the reality of life and the American Dream, and the gentrification of Brooklyn in the 2000s.
Alicia Canales Forten is in her twenties, living at home, working as a copywriter at an NYC ad agency, and engaged to James who is a medical student studying in Syracuse. One night in 2005, Alicia attended a party in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, and her view of the world changes. Alicia moves into her co-worker Lorriane's apartment, and she becomes fascinated by La Garza, a fashion designer who lives across the street from them. From making friends, to partying, to struggling to make it on her own, to rethinking her engagement to James, to the allure of La Garza's world, Alicia is drawn into a new world that brings changes to her life, as well as the unwelcome gentrification of their beloved neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
Last Night In Brooklyn is a realistic story that takes the reader along for the ride as Alicia and friends lives and friendships change in the 2000s along with their beloved Brooklyn neighborhoods with the emergence of gentrification. This is such a realistic and relatable story. Over the span of two years (2005-2007), and told in the first-person narrative, the reader follows along as Alicia's life changes when she moves out on her own to the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. As I read the story, I knew that through Alicia, the author wrote a love story to her beloved Brooklyn. The story got me thinking how when you start out in your twenties, there is the American Dream and the struggle to attain it, along with how life brings changes that is not always what one expects. With adulthood comes changes as everyone follows their own life's journey, and the realization that nothing ever really stays the same.
Last Night In Brooklyn is an interesting book that captures the essence of changes that come in life.
Rating: 4 Stars 
About The Author
Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning novel Olga Dies Dreaming, the Reese’s Book Club Pick Anita de Monte Laughs Last, and her latest novel Last Night in Brooklyn. She is a contributor to The Atlantic, where she was recognized as a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary. A native Brooklynite and proud public-school graduate, Gonzalez holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before writing she worked as an entrepreneur, consultant, wedding planner, fundraiser, tarot reader and writer of etiquette columns. She currently lives between Brooklyn and Long Island with her dog Hectah Lavoe.
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