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To love Miami is to accept that it is a city in flux. Jonathan Escoffery, one of its writers, recommends books that help pin the Florida metropolis down.
Trelawney, the second-generation Jamaican American protagonist of Jonathan Escoffery’s debut short story collection, If I Survive You, is obsessed with identity his identity and the identity of everyone else he encounters. From suburban Miami-Dade County to the Midwest to Jamaica and then back to Miami, this obsession with knowing who he is and what he is haunts him. As we follow Trelawney on his identity walkabout, we are bombarded with descriptions of skin complexions and eye colors and hair waviness, as if the only factors that matter in creating a personal identity are surface-level attributes. The collection’s first story, “In Flux”, documents Trelawney’s identity obsession from pre-teen to college graduate.“It begins with What are you? Hollered from the perimeter of your front yard when you’re nine younger, probably.” The whole collection begins, and ends, unfortunately, with this identity obsession, at the expense of deeper characterization and nuance.