If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery PDF Download

October 31, 2022 admin admin Fiction

Table of Contents

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery eBook read online or download for free. “If I Survive You ” is an impressive book that is now available in various formats including Kindle, ePub, and PDF. If you need this book in any specific format, you can request us.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery Book Review

“If I Survive You ” is a good book that you can read online or download to read it later. Before starting the reading or downloading, here is the summary of the book that you can read. 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 their 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―himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica―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.

Brief Summary If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

The strength of this book are the characters and the themes. Trelawny is realistically messy. Through the novel he questions his identity, asking again and again what he is. His skin is brown, but he does not speak the language of the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans around him. His hair is kinky, but he is not dark enough to be black. The world around him struggles to place his identity, and so does he. To add to this challenge, his parents seem to have a strong preference for his older brother, which leads to Trelawny living in a vehicle rather than trying to claim a place in the homes of either of his parents. This feeling of being perpetually out of a place felt very real, and made Trelawny a very sympathetic character. We did get a couple of stories from other characters, which added to our view of Trelawny and gave us some depth for the individuals around him.