Blog Post Week 12 [Papi]

I was interested in this week’s reading. It is definitely an absorbing novel and not even slightly dull. If I were to go as far as to say I really enjoyed it, I even liked it in the sense that it is just not my cup of tea, and I do not know if I would find myself reaching for it if it weren’t for the class. Nevertheless, it kept my attention span and my focus well.

I was pleasantly surprised by the narration of this novel. Usually, you would think that having a child narrator would either kill the whole atmosphere of a book with their innocence and gullibility or even go as far as to sound fake and unrealistic since it is an adult attempting to think as. a child or pretending to be a child, which can be even more challenging to do words though. But the author does a great job at writing the voice of the little girl. It does pluck the reader into the story and makes it feel like an actual child poured their thoughts into a book about their father.

I also found captivating this tangent about parent idealization. Usually, as kids, we tend to generate and admire unconditionally of parents. We believe them to have no flaws and be perfect, only to, more often than not, find ourselves to be mistaken. This, to me, really shows an upscaled and more violent coming-up age where at the end f the day, a girl starts to realize that the idea and the image she has of her dad is not really what she thinks it to be, something that many people have done through the years.

This is a story that tells the story of a father that is gone often, is at times unreliable, has potentially good intentions but poor executions, does not always has his priorities lined up correctly and does have a love for their child. Without the element of mafia, violence and sexuality that the father portrays, it feels like any other average relationship where the parental figure is not ideal. In a sense, it represents the reality of many, many children but is put in a way that looks appealing and interesting and portrays a tale as old as time in a different facade that would make it feel other and fictional because who would be controlled and pulled towards something so ordinary and mundane as their relationship with their parent.