If I Survive You Book Review
Updated: Oct 7
Life gets easier as you get older. Maybe?
If I Survive You was written by Jonathan Escoffery. The genre of the book is fiction, and the theme is literary short stories.
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.
The book follows the characters Trelawny, Delano, and Cukie.
This book was all about survival.
For Trelawny, 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.
For Delano, I believe If I Survive You is about whether he survives his father. All the pressures his dad put on him. The pressure to be this great man.
And what survival means for Cukie is all about surviving his dad.
His dad was foul.
You go through some times where Cukie goes back home to be with his dad, and you're like, "Okay, he's teaching him how to fish. His dad is teaching him how to do all this stuff."
But then you get a surprise later!
Trelawny makes some friends when he gets older, and one of the friends is an Asian American woman in school with him. She says she feels too privileged not to be white.
She wasn't saying that she wanted to be white. She was asking why the class part of her lifestyle and her heritage didn't count for more than just her color, race, or designation.
That part is really important to the book because Trelawny goes through this entire identity crisis where he's like, "I'm brown."
Trelawny emphasizes that he is not Black. He is Jamaican.
When classmates want to know whether Trelawny's mother, or Jamaicans in general, talk a certain way, Trelawny has to decide whether the question is offensive. He begins to see himself as an "other."
Trelawny 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.
Trelawny saw himself as being an immigrant with a diverse culture and diverse heritage. So he was really stuck in this weird place.
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 is desperate for money and ends up answering these Craigslist ads, and you're just like...
Trelawny was finding himself and searching for who he was throughout the entire book.
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So, If I Survive You is all about whether these young adolescents can crawl and scratch their way 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.
If I Survive You was really great. It was a bunch of really short stories put together, but they were all about the same characters, and they were all about identity.
So let's get to the last point: Would I reread this book?
No, I would not reread it.
My criteria for 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.
Trelawny, Delano, and Cukie were great characters, but no, I would not reread this book.
Let me know if you enjoy coming-of-age books where characters are trying to find their identity and find their place in the world.
Until the next book review,
Kyla
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