Nombres y Animales

As in Rita Indiana's debut novel, "Papi," it is a child's voice--innocent, but with a certain sarcastic edge--that holds forth on a range of topics in "Nombres y animales." The narrator discusses animals, music, and television, as well as--more revealingly--family, mothers and fathers, initiation, learning, and what may exist after life. The everyday and the dream-like collide in this novel that reverberates with echoes of the Caribbean and that describes what it means to come of age in that region, what it means to be a woman in Latin America, and what it means to write in the present day.