The adolescent “narrative voice” of Yunior in “Fiesta, 1989” is what intrigued me the most this week. In “Funeral for a Bird,” we explored the literary device of the child narrator, which we determined conferred a sense of innocence on the reading. For Máximo, it was his inexperience with life that shaped his worldview, and thus, the way that we as readers perceived his world. In other texts, alternatively, was the hyperaware “adult narrator.” In Grieving, for instance, the narrative voice of Rivera-Garza has seen and heard too much to ever operate once again from the state of childlike bliss; her reading is tainted by her knowledges of political unrest, death, and reality. Falling in the middle of this “child-adult” narrative voice is Yunior’s. Like Máximo, he is not yet old enough to identify how his father’s abuse, affair, and skewed family dynamics relate to deeper questions about political and social issues, poverty and diaspora. Yet like the “adult voice,” his is mature enough to advance a bit of a critique of his situation. So, as readers we are presented with this “in-between” narrative voice that simultaneously makes us sympathetic to the parts of it that are still “childlike,” while at the same time Yunior’s awareness of his situation resonates with us as readers from the outside looking in. I wonder what a younger reader (say, 13 or 14) would make of this text – would they find Yunior’s adolescent narrative voice overly mature, or on-par with their own?