Papi

April 11, 2016
Indiana's genre-defying novel, her first translated into English, captures the intensity of a growing up with a drug lord for a father. Told from the perspective of an unnamed 8-year-old girl whose penchant for hyperbole betrays a tenuous grasp on reality, Indiana pulls from her own childhood split between Santo Domingo and the U.S. to highlight the hallucinatory bizarrity of being the daughter of Papi, a drug dealer whose enigmatic stature the young narrator cloaks in a veneer of pop culture references and consumerist excess. Papi showers the narrator with toys and trips until a switchblade in the tire of his Mercedes signals his fall from the unspecified drug trade. The novel dives heavily into surreal aspects of her childhoodâsuch as the narrator and Papi shooting ducks from a car doing doughnuts at 200 miles per hourâwhile taking the occasional breath to ground itself with more concrete details of life growing up in the Dominican Republic. As Papi goes deeper into crime and drugs, Indiana matches her lively sentences to the emotional state of the narrator, including more and more frenetic sequences of fantasy that unfold alongside rising emotional trauma. The prose reverberates with energy; Indianaâwho is a musician as well as a writerâhas a keen ear, and Obejas brilliantly transfigures her prosody into English. Deeply felt and formally inventive, Indiana's novel crackles with intensity and oddity.

February 1, 2016
Most children believe their parents are perfect, and the realization that they aren't typically comes as something of a shock. But the 8-year-old unnamed protagonist of Dominican writer Indiana's English-language debut is not typical. In fact, she's always had mixed feelings about Papi, the father who can bring her from agony to exultation in the course of an afternoon. On one hand, Papi is larger than life, presenting himself as if he owns the world and everything in it. Cocky and brash, he drips wealth and conspicuous consumption. Is he really important, she wonders? If so, why? The answers to these basic questions are far more elusive than the little girl would like, but as she bounces between Papi's U.S. and Dominican mansions, clues about his less-than-legal vocation come to the fore. She notices, for example, that people fawn all over her dad and hang on to his every word as they beg for handouts and favors. It's unsettling. Worse, there's another side to Papi. And although the child clearly loves her dad and is thrilled to be part of his entourage, she has also had to reckon with the fact that Papi can be irresponsible, conniving, and cutthroat. Furthermore, she knows that he treats women badly and has herself been on the receiving end of his broken promises and blatant lies. Not surprisingly, the child is perplexed, and as she struggles to make sense of the dysfunction, images gleaned from horror movies, science fiction, telenovelas, and fantasy collide with her lived experience. Throughout, long run-on sentences force readers to sort through a dizzying array of words, emotions, and images. Palpable pain spills forth, as do the girl's confusion, angst, and tumultuous inner life. A masterfully drawn, if sad, work of experimental coming-of-age fiction.

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March 1, 2016
Her Papi, says the unnamed eight-year-old protagonist of Indiana's manic novel, is like Jason from Friday the 13th: he shows up when you least expect him. And he always comes back. And come back he does from the U.S. to the family's home in Santo Domingo, returning like a conquering hero, like the biggest celebrity in the worldat least in the eyes of his daughter, who deifies him. Papi, it turns out, owns a dealership, ostensibly a car dealership, but it's obvious it's drugs he is dealing, not autos. It's unclear whether his daughter is aware of this, however, since her grasp on realitywhich exists somewhere between dream and deliriumseems tenuous at best. Indeed, her stream-of-consciousness narrative creates a world like Alice's Wonderlandif it had been set in the Dominican Republic, that is. Papi is a curiosity, apparently a cult classic in the Caribbean, while its author is a celebrated musician and something of a cult classic herself. Does that make her sui generis? Readers will decide for themselves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)