Survival is EVERYTHING! | If I Survive You Book Review

Life gets easier as you get older. Maybe? Today on Kyla's Reading Day I am discussing the fiction book, If I Survive You. This book was written by Jonathan Escoffrey. The genre of the book is fiction. The theme of the book is literature short stories. So this book is really funny to read. Let's discuss the book cover: you have smoke coming off of a match, and flat tires on this boring-looking station wagon (which I don't even think exists anymore), and the book follows the characters Trulani, Delano, and Cookie.

This book was all about survival. For Trulani, I believe that you is himself. He had to get over himself. He had to get over being the second born. He had to get over the loss of his family. Being a child of divorce, not getting the house, 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 what survival means for Cookie is all about surviving his dad. His dad was foul. 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, and his dad is teaching him how to get all this stuff, but then you get a surprise later!

Trulani makes some friends when he gets older, and one of the friends is this Asian-American 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 counts for more than just my race my designation and so that part is really important to the book because Trulani goes through this entire identity crisis where he's like I'm brown. Trulani emphasizes that he is not Black; he is Jamaican. When classmates want to know Trulani's mother (or Jamaicans) talk like that, Trulani had to decide whether this qurstion was offensive and he bagan to see hinself as an other.

Trulani was juggling the fact that he was not a 'terrible Black person' like what he sees in his neighbors, yet he was privileged.. a little. Trulani saw himself as being an immigrant with a diverse culture and diverse heritage. So he was really stuck in this really weird place and then he eventually goes to college where he ends up being the token Black boyfriend for a lot of girls. You get to a part later in the story where he just is desperate for money and ends up these Craig List ads and you're just like Trulani was finding himself and searching for who he was in the entire book. So while you're here go on and subscribe to the channel. If you want to hear me talk about more books like this and more books written by Jamaican-American authors, subscribe to the channel.

So, If I Survived You is all about whether these young adolescents can crawl and scratch their ways up to getting 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 now they're on the other side, okay? So, If I Survived You was really great. It's It was a bunch of really short stories put together, but they were all about the same characters and they were all about identity. All right, so let's get to the last point: would I reread this book? No, I would not reread it. My criteria on rereading a book is if I would miss the characters, if I'd wonder what they were doing in a couple of years, and I wouldn't do that necessarily. Trulani, Delano, and Cookie were great characters, but no, I would not reread this book.

Thank you for hanging out and reading my review of the book If I Survived You by Jonathan Escoffrey. Let me know if you enjoy coming-of-age books where characters are trying to find their identity and finding their place in the world. Until next time on Kyla's Reading Day.

Kyla