We need the touchstone, we crave it as the stories go on, jumping in time and between different perspectives ... An ancestor is more than just an antecedent, and the short stories stand mighty on their own. The transitions between these distinct voices are sometimes jarring. This is intentional: As in life, the chapters are shaped, shaken, cut short by what it means to be an American — Black American, American immigrant, Caribbean American, qualify and hyphenate at will ... As with words on either side of a hyphen, it takes reading these stories side by side, front to back — taking them as a whole — to truly understand the characters’ history ... Across her borderless, boundaryless novel, Yanique is telling us a myth of her own. By the end it is clear that this is our mythology. On this tumultuous mapping of American magic, we find ourselves at the center. This novel boldly tells us: You are here.

... richly layered ... complex ... The novel careens magically across the American landscape, shifting ingeniously between literary styles as it charts the trail of impaired loves in these two uprooted families ... The sweetness of the Caribbean-based mother and daughter romantic narratives (humorously diluted by their compulsive swearing) differs strikingly in tone and style from the earlier sections that trace Fly’s family history, as though these two families inhabit emotionally and spiritually separate worlds. The first chapter is an edgy satire on race, religion, and sex, with a slightly fantastical and apocalyptic overlay ... The novel’s tone, style, and point of view constantly shift, with no two of the dozen chapters having quite the same narrative voice ... The shifts are sometimes jarring and that is exactly the point. The fragmented architecture is yet another strategy to create dislocation, a form that mirrors the fractured and stunted loves of the two families and the nonlinear path that brings them together. In a lesser author’s hands, the project could feel forced and fragmented, but Yanique brilliantly unifies the novel through her scintillating, consistently lyrical language, whether using lampoon, introspection, or tense social drama.

Each of the novel’s characters carries the residues of an initial love and its shattered illusions; these go on to shape the relationships that follow ... The characters lurch from beginning to beginning, always bringing the past with them. Yanique inhabits many of their divergent points of view ... Themes of race, religion, class, and education appear throughout this ambitious novel, but its abiding focus is on the intimate, and the way broader social forces can impinge upon it ... Yanique...retains only echoes of the magical realism that influenced her first novel. Rather, reality assumes a surreal tinge, and the fluidity of narration, across time, place, and characters, imparts an epic register to the intimate encounter between Stela and Fly. Though this episodic mode can, at times, diminish the novel’s narrative tension, the drama of its last fifty pages proves ample compensation.

Like an earnest suitor, [the book] declares its intentions from the start: in the epigraph that laments the challenge of being taken seriously when writing about love and in a prologue that explores the complex nature of romantic love. To varying degrees, it succeeds on both counts ... a surprisingly lean, three-part, multigenerational novel ... Each section is compelling in its own way ... threads converge when Stela and Fly meet. They are absolutely lovely, but ironically, this is where the story falters the most, allowing the barest glimpse of how they could be together ... Yanique deftly explores the role identity, religion and culture as well as family play in who and how we're able to love. Even though the primary love story was always going to come second to those connections, the climax and payoff of that transnational, multigenerational storytelling is still surprisingly brief and less rewarding than the journey ... a story that has been building to something great contracts, becoming darker and constrained by new external forces at the 11th hour. It's frustrating, as though the author is withholding her love, and what's offered in return can only skim the surface of these larger crises.

Yanique’s attention to detail and her characters’ generational wounds is well thought out. The residue of those wounds plays out both subtly and with force in how Fly and Stela view one another as well as themselves. The family histories Yanique weaves in explain the couple’s motivation, whether they are running from their experiences or finally facing their traumas head on. The writing is soft and intricate with no detail wasted. Readers are lured into the themes of self-discovery, acceptance, and trauma, with an ending well worth the investment.

Yanique inventively juxtaposes the start of a new relationship with family histories in this sumptuous saga ... Each arc reads as an evocative short story and an episode in the two protagonists’ complex set of unraveled connections. This introspective exploration of first and lasting loves will hit the spot with fans of character-driven family dramas.

The idea isn’t new, but the gifted Yanique...shapes it into something unique and memorable as she considers the effects of cultural disconnection on desire and love ... Look to your roots, Yanique urges us, and maybe you’ll see the outline of your future ... A rich and honest examination of family histories, cultural disconnection, and the way people fall in love.