Love is the common theme that runs throughout the collection: a love with missed connections and heartbreak, a dangerous kind of love that momentarily raises Yanique’s characters out of the death-of-the-heart trance in which they live and then, with cruel indifference, drops them back into it. As the elliptical stories open up suddenly, and different narrative threads and characters are introduced, the canvas widens and mushrooms ... Her first collection of stories leaves the reader craving more.
What is at stake in these stories is not only a matter of racial and ethnic identity, however; How to Escape is also concerned with boundaries and divisions more generally ... One of the chief pleasures of reading this collection is experiencing the range of characters and voices that Yanique offers. She is capable of evoking a sense of a full life in just a few pages, and she successfully negotiates extremely varied times, places, and cultures in the space of a single story ... She is particularly good at capturing voices, both in the narration and in dialogue ... Most of the stories display Yanique’s talent at its strongest: conjuring up complex worlds that challenge us to think about the vexed question of who we are.
...a skillfully crafted collection of short stories that offer ample rewards—vivid characterizations, evocative language—at their finish lines ... Unlike a good deal of earnestly multicultural fiction, Yanique’s stories look beyond mere ethnicity to locate the subtler strands of human identity ... In her effort to cast Caribbean life in a magic light, Yanique sometimes relies on folklore’s well-worn tropes ... Yanique finds apt expression for her characters’ struggles in these short but urgent sprints.
Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez before her, Tiphanie Yanique transports the reader to another place by mixing the real world with the stuff of legend, myth and folk lore ... More than anything else, these stories feel as if they've been passed down through the ages—shared between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons—in hopes that the new generation will learn from the past wrongs that have been done
'The Bridge Stories,' gives us a fanciful Caribbean in which people wear little bridge symbols around their necks and actual bridges connect many of the islands to each other. Here, the writer gives voice to an island itself ... But these longer stories I didn't find either completely satisfying or completely whole. They each had moments: the vitality of a crowded dance floor, the intensity of the first kiss in a new love affair, but the shorter stories stole my affection and make the book worth the buying.
Each tale includes memorable characters that represent the many diverse ethnicities found throughout the many islands; and incorporates themes of love, coming of age, the after effects of colonization, and the many ways the different cultures coalesce and clash. Altogether, the stories within How to Escape from a Leper Colony embrace and portray everything that makes the Caribbean unique ... Perhaps it is this love—the love for the Caribbean and its culture—that has lead Yanique to create this inspiring collection that consumes the reader completely, leading them to love each character the way Yanique loves her fellow Caribbean people.
The effects of colonialism throb in Yanique’s vivid debut collection ... Yanique frequently dips into rich, fanciful vernacular, such as in 'Street Man,' a beautiful, sad glimpse at a doomed love affair between a college student and a St. Croix local ... A smattering of dark humor leavens the tense narratives as Yanique penetrates the perils and pleasures of lives lived outside resort walls.
