Getting the average reader interested in reading about the history of the Dominican Republic is a pretty daunting undertaking.  Based on that premise alone, it's hard to imagine a publishing house rushing to publish this novel.  I myself, a Spanish major in college who has lived abroad for long stretches and has a more than passing interest in the history of Latin America, would not have rushed to the store to buy a book about this tiny, poor Caribbean nation.  Couching such a history lesson as a story of one family's immigration and assimilation into the US over the course of several generations has been done successfully before, and that overall story structure serves this tale well.  The author deftly weaves together the various generations of the DeLeon family, going easily between the present and the past and gradually letting the reader discover the indignities both small and large that people living under a military dictatorship must endure.  Other than a few chapters in the middle where I thought the tale lingered a bit too long on the sexual coming-of-age of a secondary character, the writing is wonderful, and yet would not have been sufficient to catapult this novel into the stratosphere of the Pulitzer were it not for the amazing protagonist.