I loved Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is grand in scope and beautifully entwined with history (and pop culture). In contrast, This is How You Lose Her feels small and a bit repetitive. (To a degree, that's probably to be expected - the former is a novel; the latter is... an extended character study of sorts) 
 I get it, I get it - stories featuring a young Dominican man bursting with with lust and machismo are evidently the author's shtick. I just hope that eventually he will use his prodigious writing ability to explore other lives, too. 
 I'm sick of Yunior. He cheats on women again and again.... and seems to learn nothing, not about himself or about relationships, or what he wants in life. After a while, it's "ho hum, Yunior (or his family member, or his friend) is screwing yet another girl he doesn't exactly love. Gee, I wonder how this could possibly end...." But I guess that's the point. He's trapped in a cycle of his own doing. To him, each woman is a pleasing collection of sexual body parts. He obsesses over each woman, sees her life history and personal circumstance clearly enough, but rarely focuses on any individual personalities. 
 No, narrators and characters don't always have to be likable - of course it can be intriguing when they make bad decisions. It's just a little boring to read the same story of lust-then-loss repeated throughout Yunior's life. 
 Ah, but the writing! When it comes to storytelling itself, Junot Diaz certainly knows what he's doing. 
 A couple things I did enjoy: 
 - There is (very briefly) a responsible Puerto Rican girl named Paloma who refuses to have sex with Yunior!!! She takes no nonsense from a molest-y teacher, and finally leaves behind familial/cultural dysfunction to attend college. ...it should be obvious why I (shallowly!) find this minor character appealing. 
 - Nonlinear order in which the stories are presented: e.g. allows his brother Rafa's minor childhood kindnesses to be mitigated by the knowledge of his later actions 
 - The Spanglish :) 
 - "Otravida, Otravez" - the only story not told from Yunior's point of view, but instead from the view of Yasmin, a woman running a hospital laundry and sleeping with a man whose wife lives back in Santo Domingo. I found her far more interesting-- refreshing, even: the single different window into the machismo being dissected in the rest of the book. 
 Relatedly: Junot Diaz on Writing Women Characters 
 From an interview with The Atlantic: 
 The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. For me, I always want to do better... I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am. 
 Good: Acknowledging how many male authors write awfully flat women characters, solely as objects for male characters to interact with. 
 Bad: Is the gulf of experience between men and women so vast as to be uncrossable with writerly empathy? Why would he admit that female writers often have little problem writing excellent male characters? Maybe he and I just have differing beliefs on gender essentialism....? 
 A few paragraphs down, he says what I had been thinking all along: 
 There's an enormous resource for any male writer--and they're called women. This is not fucking rocket science. 
 Right. Well. I certainly agree. It shouldn't be rocket science - why pretend it's so difficult? Women are not exotic alien creatures - they're people you interact with and speak to every day. 
 Keep on observing women, Mr. Diaz. In a couple of years, I would love to hear what your female characters have to say.