Wonderful writing...romance, adventure, and a social critique...In a 2019 interview, the author describes how an "AfroLatina young woman was moved to activism about both climate change and colonization." (Source: https://latinxinpublishing.com/blog/interview-with-aya-de-leon)

It started out interesting, and a bit confusing but i kept on reading in hope that it would change and become better. I liked the parts when they made food, watched tv and connected through it, but i didn`t like Dulce so much and Zavier was a bit meh? Plus all the cursing annoyed me.

There's so much I loved about this book. Coming from Santo Domingo and having family in PR made this book really familiar to me in the descriptions and somehow in the way the characters reacted to some situations. Dulce was an amazingly complex heroine and Marisol won me over really quickly. This book was the perfect latinx heist plot I didn't know I needed.

Dulce and Marisol are my new heroes. This book was great. I love reading about women that are strong and this story did not disappoint.

A Latina Ocean’s 8 (ideally starring Cardi B) which brilliantly braids politics and pop culture. Featured as Best Women’s Fiction in the 2019 Latinidad List.

Dulce Garcia goes through it in this installment of A Justice Hustlers novels, and I was here for it from chapter one to the end.

Dulce runs from an abuser in New York to the Dominican Republic, has to think on her feet to survive and when it looks like it can’t get worse for her, Hurricane Maria rains down on her, literally.

Aya de Leon is a prolific writer that takes you into the story, and I enjoy anything she writes. The only thing for this book that keeps it from being a five read for me was that at times I felt the writing was a bit disjointed and I had to go back and read to figure out what was going on. However, with that said, it did not stop me from enjoying the story, and I look forward to the next one.

I highly recommend her books if you enjoy Urban fiction.

I can’t talk about this book without first talking about de León’s Author’s Note. In it, she talks about the process of writing this novel, about how Hurricane María hitting Puerto Rico changed her plan for the narrative, and how her research and work with a sensitivity reader helped to shape the final book. But there’s one section that particularly stands out for me:

Ultimately, I stand by the whole of this book, and by the larger story I am hoping to tell about colonization, climate change, and the need for women of color to be leaders in transforming both. Surprisingly, I have found heist fiction has proven a fitting genre for this story: as these character have had to battle law and custom to find small pockets of justice and reparation. Similarly, the extended family of Puerto Rico will have to keep battling laws, customs, history, and entrenched power structure to get the justice and reparations that the island deserves.

This sums up for me the huge scope of this novel. It is a romantic suspense. It is a feminist heist. It is concerned with sex workers and abuse and activism. It is romantic as hell and it brings hope. And it is political. The comparison drawn in the title, and throughout the narrative, between the characterisation of a ‘side chick’ and the relationship that Puerto Rico has with the US, is nuanced and challenging and de León deserves to be a key voice within romantic fiction.

An outstanding book.

Bravo! A courageous and realistic tale for and about strong Latinx women. Loved the characters and the reality of their lives. Well done!

Side Chick Nation
Aya de León

Side Chick Nation by Aya de León is book four in her Justice Hustlers urban crime fiction series. I haven’t read the previous books in the series, but this one works well as a standalone.

Side Chick Nation is an unexpectedly interesting read. The author explores how climate change, colonization and a lack of appropriate response on the part of the US government played a major role in the delayed recovery in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Interestingly enough this concept was woven into the fabric of a urban crime fiction drama. de León brilliantly compares the “side chick” phenomenon, generally defined as a relationship between a man and a woman in addition to his relationship with his wife and/or girlfriend. The “side chick” knows that she is not a priority. Many from Puerto Rico now see their homeland as the US’s side chick. They pay the same taxes but don’t reap the same benefits or rewards.

Dolores “Dulce” Garcia, the side chick in this novel, finds herself trapped in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Dulce is of Cuban and Dominican descent but fled to Puerto Rico to escape her abusive boyfriend. Dulce has been a sex worker since the age of fourteen. She knows the score and frequently places herself in the role of sugar baby or side chick. Following the hurricane, she is confronted with the Puerto Rican situation and joins journalists who are striving to get the story out to the masses. Dulce is forced to decide if she’s worthy of girlfriend or wife status. This is her story and the story of an island of people trying to rise above “side chick” status.

Side Chick Nation is entertaining and informative. I found it a little slow in the beginning and the multiple storylines were initially a bit confusing, but the pace picked up and the storylines resolved. I rate Side Chick Nation a solid 4 out of 5 stars and recommend it to anyone who enjoys intelligent urban fiction.

My thanks to Kensington Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book. However, the opinions expressed in this review are 100% mine and mine alone.

Side chick, n:

The other woman; also known as the mistress; a female that is neither a male's wife or girlfriend who has relations with the male while he is in another relationship (Urban Dictionary)

(African American Vernacular, slang) A mistress; a woman one dates in addition to one's girlfriend or wife, usually in secret (Wiktionary)


Dulce García knows exactly what it means to be a side chick. Wooed by a far older man when she was only fourteen, Dulce thought she'd won the role of princess in a Disney movie, a girl destined to live happily after with a man who promised to take care of her. Instead, her prince turned out to be a pimp, asking her to sleep with others as a favor, and then as an expectation, and finally, not asking at all. Dulce's eighteen before a group of activist former and current sex workers helps her flee from the violent man (see previous books in the Justice Hustlers series).

But the patterns Dulce learned during her years with her pimp are hard to escape. Her next long-term boyfriend hooks her with the line "Would you do me the honor of letting me pay your bills?" This boyfriend doesn't ask her to sleep with anyone else, but before long he stops taking her out and lavishing money on her, even interrupting their time together to read and answer texts from some other woman. Dulce knows she's about to be demoted from side chick to nonentity, and steals her boyfriend's drug dealing stash so she can flee to the Dominican Republic where she has family.

But small-town life in the DR is too slow for Dulce, and she's soon picking up wealthy men in hotels on different Caribbean islands, staying with her sugar-daddies for days or weeks at a time, entertaining them while their wives and girlfriends wait for them back in the States. Even while on date with Xavier, a Puerto Rican reporter now living in the U. S., a man who actually seems to like her for herself, Dulce instinctively answers the call from a past sugar daddy looking to hook up again. And lies to Xavier about the man who's picking her up in the middle of their dinner.

But then Hurricane Irma slows the flow of sugar daddies visiting the Caribbean to a trickle. And Dulce finds herself sleeping in a storage room in San Juan, waiting for the next hurricane to hit.

Hurricane María...

If you are looking for a narrative of personal redemption, a story in which an unworthy heroine is punished and made humble by the elements and by the suffering of herself and others, and is thus made worthy of love and respect, Side Chick Nation is not the book for you. All the anger in de León's narrative is for those take advantage of vulnerable people like Dulce: abusive husbands, boyfriends, and pimps; privileged reporters complaining about the tough conditions they have to live with in order to report on the conditions in Puerto Rico post-hurricane; relief workers and rescuers more eager to dish out verbal abuse than material aid; and above all, the United States, the colonizer that continues to bleed its territory dry. Though she writes with tension and suspense of Dulce's physical trials during and after María hits the island, de León is far more interested in the ways that the natural disaster, and the United States' lackluster response to it, demonstrates a longer term pattern, a pattern illuminated by her book's title. Puerto Rico, like Dulce herself, is no more than a side chick to the powerful, alluring, but ultimately exploitative country that "won" her more than a hundred years ago.

But is every man, and every American, on the market for a side chick? In the aftermath of the hurricane, Xavier is back in Puerto Rico, worried about Dulce and hard in pursuit of the real stories behind the devastating natural disaster. Savvy Dulce, knowing that Xavier might just be her ticket out of the devastated country, finds her way to the hotel where he and the other American reporters are being housed. But as Xavier invites her to work with him covering the story, Dulce's joy in writing, a joy she had almost forgotten after being lured into a life of prostitution, reemerges. But will her past as a sex worker stand in the way of her new dreams? And can she trust any man, even one as seemingly kind as Xavier, is not ultimately out to exploit her?

In her Author's Note, de León explains that she was developing a different storyline for this fourth book in her Justice Hustlers series when María hit Puerto Rico. Writing within the confines of the genre conventions of the series makes for an uneven narrative; heists in which the previous members of the Hustlers ladies, but not Dulce, participate, are important to "the larger story [de Léon is] hoping to tell about colonization, climate change, and the need for women of color to be leaders in transforming both," but don't feel integral to Dulce's personal or romantic arcs (Kindle Loc 4976). Nor do the side stories of New Yorker Marisol, the protagonist of The Boss, and her cousins back on the island. But as De León argues in the conclusion to her Author's Note, "heist fiction has proven a fitting genre for this story: as these characters have had to battle law and custom to find small pockets of justice and reparation, similarly, the extended family of Puerto Rico will have to keep battling laws, customs, history, and entrenched power structures to get the justice and the reparations that the island deserves" (4976). No woman—and no territory—deserves to be anyone's side chick.