A review by elenasquareeyes
Papi by Rita Indiana
4.0
Drawing on her own memories of a childhood split between Santo Domingo and visits with her father amid the luxuries of the United States, Papi is the story of an eight-year-old girl and the relationship with her father.
Papi is a short yet fast-paced read. The way it’s written, with many long, run-on sentences, followed by lots of short sentences with repetition makes you read it faster and faster. It’s interesting that this manic style of story-telling is mostly present when the girls father is around, or she is anticipating his arrival. It makes her father feel like a whirlwind, a force to be reckoned with that picks her up and takes her along for the ride.
Papi is from a child’s perspective so there’s lots of fantastical imagery used where a child might fill in the gaps of what she actually knows. Her father is rich and popular with many business associates, while reading this you presume that means he’s a drug dealer but you never really get that idea from the narrator. She see’s her father as the best thing ever and the way events or people are described do feel like you’re in the imagination of a child. That being said, some of the words used feel far older than what an eight-year-old girl would be using. This adds another level of weirdness to the narrative as you’re never really sure as to what’s real and what’s not.
There’s not really much plot to Papi, or if there is, I often lost it. it’s scattered and hard to follow but there’s something about it that’s captivating. It’s more about the evocative imagery it presents about a girl’s relationship with her father than a story with a true beginning, middle and end.
Papi is a short yet fast-paced read. The way it’s written, with many long, run-on sentences, followed by lots of short sentences with repetition makes you read it faster and faster. It’s interesting that this manic style of story-telling is mostly present when the girls father is around, or she is anticipating his arrival. It makes her father feel like a whirlwind, a force to be reckoned with that picks her up and takes her along for the ride.
Papi is from a child’s perspective so there’s lots of fantastical imagery used where a child might fill in the gaps of what she actually knows. Her father is rich and popular with many business associates, while reading this you presume that means he’s a drug dealer but you never really get that idea from the narrator. She see’s her father as the best thing ever and the way events or people are described do feel like you’re in the imagination of a child. That being said, some of the words used feel far older than what an eight-year-old girl would be using. This adds another level of weirdness to the narrative as you’re never really sure as to what’s real and what’s not.
There’s not really much plot to Papi, or if there is, I often lost it. it’s scattered and hard to follow but there’s something about it that’s captivating. It’s more about the evocative imagery it presents about a girl’s relationship with her father than a story with a true beginning, middle and end.