If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

This book’s power is made even more sharp by its economy, it’s exactitude. The interconnected stories, or loosely connected chapters, however you choose to name them, are so rich in nuance that Escoffery blazes fearlesslessly along with an inventive narrative structure that doesn’t forego character development or emotion in the least. In fact, he amplifies those elements with concise and spot-on language. Trelawny is the main character and the book opens in his voice speaking in the second person. Although Trelawny’s mother is a pivotal character, the novel primarily focuses on him, his brother and father, each allowed their own points of view. I was expecting the book to be about an immigrant family’s struggle, but the images of poverty, one boy’s fraught emergence into manhood, and his desperation to feel at home was what also shone through. Miami comes alive in an era post hurricane Andrew and later during a recession that leaves the characters no choice but to hustle, dream, and take risks. I loved this book, the voices I was introduced to, and the experiences that felt so new to me yet terribly true. Thank you to the author for taking so much time to bring this beautiful work into the world.

About If I Survive You:

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what the younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”

Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper, Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin Cukie looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.

Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

Read more of Jeannie’s Reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org.