If I Survive You book review

Life gets easier as you get older. Maybe? Keep reading to find out what book I'm reviewing today. 

Hey, y'all, it's Kyla Denanyoh. Today, we're talking about the book If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffrey. The genre is fiction, and the theme is literature short stories. 

This book is really funny to read. You got smoke coming off of a match, you got flat tires, and it follows the characters Trelawny, Delano, and Cukie. This book was all about If I Survive You. 

For Trulani, I believe that you are himself. He had to get over himself, over being the secondborn, over the loss of his family, being a child of divorce, not getting the house, and all of that stuff. 

Delano, I believe If I Survived You is if he survived his father. All the pressures his dad put on him, the pressures to be this great man. 

And then If I Survived You for Cukie was all about surviving his dad. His dad was fouled. You go through some times where he goes back home to be with his dad, and you're like, okay, he's teaching him how to fish, he's teaching him how to get all this stuff, and then you get a surprise later. 

So Trelawny makes some friends when he gets older. One of the friends is this Asian American who is in school with him, and she goes, "I guess I just feel too privileged not to be white." She wasn't saying that she wanted to be white, but she just was like, "Why doesn't the class part of my lifestyle and my heritage count for more than just my color, my designation?"

That part is essential to the book because Trelawny goes through an identity crisis. He says, "I'm brown, but I'm not black, right? I'm Jamaican." People always want to know why their mom talks like that. But I'm also not the terrible black people that I see my neighbors and my family members talking about. So he was stuck between being privileged enough not to be a Black American but not so privileged that everyone else in the world saw him as being this immigrant with this diverse culture and diverse heritage. So he was stuck in this peculiar place. Then he eventually goes to college, where he becomes the token Black boyfriend for many girls. You get to a part later in the story where he is desperate for money and ends up with Craigslist ads, and you're just like Trulani was finding himself and searching for who he was in the entire book. 

If I Survived, You is all about whether these young adolescents can crawl and scratch their way to some little bit of success so that they can find themselves, respect themselves, and realize that they have made it through a hellish ordeal and are on the other side. The book was great. It was a bunch of short stories, but they were all about the same characters and identity.

So, would I reread this book? I would not. My criteria for rereading a book are whether I would miss the characters or wonder what they were doing in a couple of years, and I wouldn't necessarily do that. Trelawny, Delano, and Cukie were great characters, but I would not reread this book. 

Until the next book review, Kyla