hwestenhofer 's review for:

Solito by Javier Zamora

2.0

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Ugh, how I hate to rate this book as poorly as I did, especially because I know that Zamora writes well. In the last section of the book when Zamora writes from Javier's grown-up perspective and in the acknowledgments section, it's clear that he's a good writer; moreover, his poetry is quite captivating. Nonetheless, the prose for the majority of this novel is very staccato with the intent of creating a child-like voice, but the effect was that it bored me as a reader and made all the emotions feel contrived (and they're obviously not based on his experiences and the last section of the book). Furthermore, I felt that the structure of the book didn't make sense because it seems, at first, that he's going to structure the chapters around where Javier's at in the book, but this is only partially true. The chapters are also extremely too long, and I think that it would've been better constructed with parts and chapters rather than just chapters. He also includes details for too many unnecessary things, and I think that this book could've been much shorter. Don't get me wrong, it was very insightful to read about the experiences of migrants, something I did not realize I knew so little about, and I'm also looking forward to reading his poetry; however, reading this book was quite painstaking. If I were a younger reader, I may have enjoyed it more, and this harsh review is not me saying that you shouldn't read it, but it just didn't do what I wanted it to do for me.