It is the third of Díaz's books to feature his recurring protagonist Yunior, following his 1996 short story collection, Drown and his 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

It traces Yunior taking Magdalena on a vacation to Santo Domingo in an unsuccessful effort to salvage their relationship.

In conversation with Hilton Als, Junot calls it a foundational story, and an alternative to the narrative "Negocios," found in Drown.

The title character is named Veronica Hardrada from Paterson, New Jersey and she meets Yunior in a James Joyce class in college.

Yunior, along with his mother and older brother, Rafa, has just arrived in New Jersey from Santo Domingo, relocated by the father he barely knows.

In this story, "a teenage Yunior ponders his emergent lust in the context of Papi and Rafa’s rutting ways.

[5] This story spans five years and traces Yunior's initial break-up and his subsequent relationships of varying lengths.

Díaz establishes a parallel between Yunior's love life and the marriage of his friend, Elvis, an Iraq War veteran.

Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Díaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status.

[10][11] On the November/December 2012 issue of Bookmarks, the book received a (4.0 out of 5) with the critical summary stating, "Diaz's latest may not shine with the same brilliance as his previous works, but his signature style and artistry still ensure a mesmerizing and worthwhile read".

Díaz is both a minimalist—scraping, chiselling, honing his prose into its flinty essence—and a maximalist who's capable of code switching, flipping between the colloquial and the highbrow, creating a taut lexical calabash made up of Caribbean phrases, black American vernacular and the playful pugilism of urban street banter.