[11] Braschi's collective work explores the politics of empire and independence, while capturing the trials and tribulations of the Latin American immigrant in the United States.

[1] Through dramatic dialogues and conversations among a nameless chorus of voices, the work treats subjects as diverse as racial, ethnic, and sexual prejudice, discrimination, colonialism, Puerto Rican independence, revolution, domestic violence, and writer's block.

[17][18] The dialogue also refers to popular culture, Latin American boom, films, sex, poetry, and Puerto Rican artistic expression in New York.

by Latin American scholars as "a work heralded by such gurus as Jean Franco, Doris Sommer, and Diamela Eltit and seen as the most complex and experimental of US Puerto Rican fiction yet to be written.

(In this work) we discover as much about US/Puerto Rico sociopolitical histories as we encounter the metaphysical and existential explorations of a Cervantes, Rabelais, Diderot, Artaud, Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Borges, Cortázar, and Rosario Castellanos.

"[23][22] Gonzalez posits that "because Braschi owns every aspect of her story-world blueprint due to her equal mastery and fluency in Spanish and English," non-Spanish speaking reviewers considered the work "an affront.

Braschi’s attention to tone and rhythm, to the music of her text, is extreme.” Harold Augenbraum, Ilan Stavans, Doris Sommer, Adriana Estill,[24] Christopher Gonzalez, and other critics have used the phrase "a tour de force" to describe Yo-Yo Boing!