Ravishing ... The book, about an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet, delights in mocking the trope of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet ... There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free ... Escoffery’s protagonists, though resourceful, can’t accomplish the impossible; nor do they sacrifice themselves for the reader’s sentimental education ... The prose comes alive ... These characters are strange amalgams of limited agency and boundless originality. Their survival, perhaps, comes down to their style ... Escoffery deftly renders the disorienting effects of race as they fall, veil-like and hostile, over a world of children ... Throughout, the refrain runs like an incantation: What are you? Escoffery, hosing his characters in a stream of fines, bills, and pay stubs, studies the bleak math of self-determination.
Captivating ... While If I Survive You has a great sense of humor, it reflects little of the joy and pleasure that also define Miami — the food and music and dancing and art and flirtation that make life in the Magic City so thrilling and worthwhile ... Where Escoffery does reflect joy is in the book’s composition. Escoffery’s sentences push boundaries and create a symphony of language — breaking the rules of writing while showing his mastery of them. Each chapter takes on a different style, and readers may sense they were witnessing the emergence of a master stylist ... Still, while “f I Survive You dissects masculinity beautifully, it relegates its women to side characters ... Escoffery doesn’t let his characters off the hook, though ... If I Survive You is a lovely and complicated portrait of masculinity in one Jamaican-American family. Escoffery writes with great care and empathy for his main characters, and in doing so he reveals the richness of feeling that comes with the desire to run away.
The book moves backward and forward in time, immersing us in the muggy Miami atmosphere and the unresolved family tensions ... Given Escoffery’s skill in making me care for these characters, I wished at times that I was caught more forcefully in a current of narrative momentum with them, and some episodes...struck me as less than convincing. But the author is, throughout, a gifted, sure-footed storyteller, with a command of evocative language and perfectly chosen detail.
The best book titles feel wholly different to the reader by the time the book is finished ... It is very much to Jonathan Escoffery’s credit that, after finishing his debut story collection, If I Survive You, I realized how differently I thought of the title phrase ... Short stories, ideally, evoke a heightened sense of attention: crystallized more fully than novels, they allow the breadth of a focused stretch of time, with its layers and textures, to reveal itself. At their best, Escoffery’s stories do this ... But the book suffers a bit from having to let each story feel stand-alone, even as they largely tread the same short span of time. Getting the same backstory sketched out in so many stories, I did wonder whether there was a novel in its bones. But Escoffery also makes a strong argument for the story by virtue of the fun he has inside of it ... In the end, the book tells us — and I almost wished it didn’t — who the 'you' is ... What it also does is promise more from a writer I can’t wait to see making books for a long, long time to come.
Remarkable ... Language shines throughout the collection ... Escoffery masterfully transliterates the dialect ... Only their mother, Sanya, [is] without a dedicated story in the collection. Based on the immense talent on display in this debut, here's hoping that Escoffery's sophomore effort is a whole novel about her.
... lively ... The stories vibrate together with unspoken wordplay, phrases like 'fruit of my loins.' Correspondences that would be too clever and on the nose if explicitly stated are interesting as substrate ... Framed by the conditional 'if' but stylistically sure-footed and concrete, If I Survive You binds the caustic with the aching of a character keenly aware of the world’s vivid underinvestment in his future yet determined to keep going.
... it's a special year when a debut breaks out of this distinguished pack and takes an early lead for its originality, heart, wit and sweeping social vision. The debut I'm cheering on is called If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery and the 'you' his characters are trying to survive is America itself ... That's not to say Escoffery's characters are mere victims of Fate, as basic as that storm-stripped house of theirs. They themselves have plenty of agency to hurt, love, betray and simply misunderstand each other ... an extraordinary debut collection, an intensively granular, yet panoramic depiction of what it's like to try to make it — or not — in this kaleidoscopic madhouse of a country.
Escoffery creates a kaleidoscope of composed, colorful narrative pieces to generate an immersive story ... most notable and unique in employing a broad range of literary techniques and language throughout the course of the book. Rather than being limited to a single point of view, Escoffery switches from first person to third person, and even utilizes the less common second-person perspective ... Additionally, the author defies the narrative canon of writing in past, present or future tense for the entire work. In the hands of a less-skilled writer, these changes and shifts in style and point of view might seem distracting, but Escoffery uses each transition with purpose. The reader is given a multitude of angles and distances from which to view each character and their environment. A strong connection is created with the subject, conflict and emotion become more intense, and the setting gains additional layers of texture ... onathan Escoffery generates a vivid setting, multi-dimensional characters, and a profoundly moving message. If I Survive You demonstrates the broad range of this upcoming literary talent. Readers will enjoy this book for the variety of language and styles employed, the suspense found in each section, and the testament to human resilience even under the most difficult circumstances.
... a vibrant family saga ... Escoffery’s multiple narrators and shifting points of view broaden the scope of the text ... Trelawny’s story, both hilarious and heartbreaking, is the American story, the struggle of first-generation immigrants seeking acceptance in the country of their birth.
The unmistakable quirks and charms of the debut are present in Jonathan Escoffery’s collection ... Patriarchal conflict is Mr. Escoffery’s stubborn theme, which he enlivens with biting wit and his use of a wonderful Jamaican patois ... The focus on Trelawny is the surest sign that this is Mr. Escoffery’s first book. The younger brother is morose and self-involved and he does less of interest than any other character but appears the most because he is the sort of figure writers tend to identify with. (Mr. Escoffery goes to lengths to persuade us that his self-pity is justified, but I’m not certain that makes it less tiresome.) The stories that keep Trelawny in the background have noticeably more dramatic verve ... This accomplished story bodes well for the future: Nearly every young writer draws from autobiography, but it’s good to know that Mr. Escoffery doesn’t depend on it.
... eight stories linking to form a sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, sometimes wrenching novel about a Jamaican family in Miami ... Escoffery’s writing is lively and engaging, his stories well crafted, and he’s insightful and witty about Miami’s multiracial, multicultural, multilingual population. If I Survive You is a most promising debut.
A blazing success. With a profoundly authentic vision of family dynamics and racism in America, this collection of connected stories explores the young adulthood of a character named Trelawny ... Completely immersive, humorous yet heartbreaking ... Escoffery brings an imaginative, fresh voice to his deep exploration of what it means to be a man, son, brother, father and nonwhite immigrant in America
Escoffery paints a vivid picture of the first-generation perspective by scrutinizing the cultural differences between children who are born stateside and their parents who are not, and the complex ways this impacts their relationships. The result is a revealing, often humorous and somewhat twisted collection of stories that are as engrossing as they are memorable. One of the most delightful aspects of “If I Survive You” is Escoffery’s multifarious use of literary devices. From second person to dialect to present tense, his debut collection is rife with shifting mechanisms that provide intimate access to his characters and submerge the reader in the urgency of his world ... starts out intense and immersive but then settles into a character-driven collection of eight connected stories that shine a light on the fable and folly of contemporary life in the United States.
In If I Survive You, Escoffery writes and shares the story that captures the humanity. It captures the humanity in people trying to fight through racism, it captures the humanity in people trying to go from a have not to a have, it captures the humanity in people trying to make a home while fighting against and trying to survive all these powerful and inhumane situations. And, in a beautifully Miami way, it captures the humanity in people trying to survive hurricanes ... Escoffery captures this surreal aspect of Miami—how it is a place that is both built by immigrants and people of color but also looks down upon those same peoples. How it is both so close and so far to home for so many. Escoffery captures how storms capture the big moments in people’s lives.
Escoffery’s collection of interconnected stories confirms his already prize-winning status ... The writing and characters are nuanced, with much pain and trauma but also moments of levity and humor. Trelawny is a wonder, constantly trying to improve himself and yet battered again and again by his own actions, or, more likely, those outside his control, like the ever-present Miami hurricanes.
Sharp and inventive ... If Escoffery’s characters are ambivalent, his writing is clever, commanding, and flexible—he’s comfortable in first and second person, standard English and Jamaican patois, Miami ethnic enclaves and white-bread high rises. And he writes thoughtfully about how the exterior forces that have knocked Trelawny’s family sideways—Hurricane Andrew, poverty, racism—intersect with and stoke interior fears and bouts of self-loathing ... A fine debut that looks at the complexities of cultural identity with humor, savvy, and a rich sense of place.
