The stories in the collection If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery, are linked by Trelawny—a Jamaican American man raised in Miami—and his family.
The stories in the collection If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery, are linked by Trelawny—a Jamaican American man raised in Miami—and his family. During his college years at Florida International University, Escoffery read Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and, soon after, started experimenting with short pieces that build toward a “bigger, novel-esque world,” he told The New York Times. Throughout her novel, Cisneros, who is also a poet, uses lyrical vignettes to hopscotch between perspectives and trace Esperanza Cordero’s hilarious and heart-wrenching coming-of-age in Chicago’s diverse Humboldt Park neighborhood. Both books use inventive structures and a kaleidoscopic chorus of voices to capture their protagonists’ search for identity.