Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
One of Vulture's Best Books of 2024

"The miracle is not that Say Hello to My Little Friend works, so much as that it enlarges our sense of the possible, recalling the vanity of human aspiration not through a lens of ridicule but through one of empathy. The chorus of voices, the point-of-view shifts—all of it allows Crucet to imagine her way to a larger authenticity...I’m not naive enough to believe that a work of fiction can change the way we live. Yet throughout these pages, Crucet insists that we rethink our models for engagement, with one another and with the world at large."—David L. Ulin, The Atlantic

"To call the novel Say Hello to My Little Friend by award-winning author Jennine Capó Crucet a book about Miami would be akin to calling Moby-Dick by Herman Melville just a book about a whale. Crucet, like Melville, has created so much more than simply a novel. This is an experience...Crucet’s book...is so rich with dark humor that its sentences can both lift and break the reader’s heart...a superb, incredibly entertaining and purposefully off-kilter novel about reinvention, memory, and the good and bad baggage that comes along with life for both human and whalekind, surpassing even Tony Montana’s wildest dreams.”—The San Francisco Chronicle

"A blistering, hilarious, tragic novel that is simultaneously absurd and painfully real."—Miami Herald

"Stunning…Captivating…Both Ismael and the whale are singularly compelling characters, and both will break your heart. Unclassifiable and unforgettable."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“An impossible-to-define but highly digestible novel about Cuban heritage, migration, motherhood and the heartbreaking way young men float through life lost and desperate for meaning…There’s something undeniable about Crucet’s characters — they feel so real in how the deck remains stacked against them…The novel could easily slip into a text too dark to enjoy — the loss of Izzy’s mother is a grim undercurrent throughout the novel, even in chapters all about Lolita. It’s a relief, then, that Crucet’s prose is so sprightly and joyful.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Crucet brilliantly brings readers inside the mind of a nonhuman intelligence in this tour de force, which alternates perspectives between Lolita, a captive killer whale housed at Miami’s Seaquarium, and Izzy Reyes, a 20-year-old Cuban Miamian who works as an impersonator of the rapper Pitbull. . .Crucet’s vivid and plausible delineation of Lolita’s inner life imbue[s] the gonzo plot with genuine emotional depth. This is an impressive feat.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Jennine Capó Crucet is one of America's most distinctive writers, and Say Hello to My Little Friend is her best yet—smart, inventive, hilarious, and brimming with heart.”—Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk

"Say Hello to My Little Friend is a masterclass in pace and precision. Crucet can make you cry before you've even realized you've become invested and make you laugh even through the hurt. Brilliant."—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, National Book Award Finalist of Chain Gang All Stars

"Capó Crucet's new novel is a madcap, beautiful romp through a version of Miami I've been waiting to see in literature for years: a place of newness and impermanence, where the fluidity of language and culture and history is as central to its identity as the ocean and the tides. I loved this brilliant, hilarious novel, read it compulsively, and loved most of all its protagonist: Izzy, a young man hellbent on achieving the American dream of reinvention, and at the same time in danger of discovering more about himself and his roots than he ever hoped to know."—Daniel Alarcón, author of The King Is Always Above the People

"I literally couldn't put this book down. Bold, surprising, moving and very funny. A story about minds and bodies, about people and families and cities, about the dreams and desires and histories buried inside. Capó Crucet is a writer of immense talent and range." —Charles Yu, author of National Book Award Winner Interior Chinatown

"Say Hello to My Little Friend is superb. It’s a rare thing to see a novelist so fully in control of such disparate elements. The voice is astonishing: wry, knowing, erudite, even metafictional when necessary, and the plot it relates is irresistible. This is high level world-building. So much so that it feels both wildly inventive but also like the kind of novel only an artist directly descending from immigrants to this country could birth, one that respectfully and skillfully transmutes the literary and historical past but always through the prism of our all-powerful American pop culture. The result is that truly rare object, a novel that helps us better sense that secret hum of art and love undergirding human existence."—Sergio de la Pava, award-winning author of A Naked Singularity and Lost Empress

"An improbable, star-crossed bond between Izzy—who’s on a quest to become a modern-day Tony Montana—and Lolita—an orca held captive at the Miami Seaquarium—unleashes one of the most wildly original, hilarious, and devastating novels I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Say Hello to my Little Friend is a story about climate crisis and migration and grief and the mythologies we invent in order to survive; it is a love letter to the doomed beauty that is Miami. A place so compelling, so abundant with story, that it might take you a minute to notice all the water. I loved every line, every moment spent with this magnetic cast of characters. Jennine Capó Crucet has long been one of my very favorite writers and Say Hello to My Little Friend reads with the dazzling vision of an American classic."—Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears