Jasmon Drain

3.5 This is a series of connected stories kind of like House on Mango Street without the poetics, but with each chapter having the option to stand alone, yet being more filled out when read in context together. Tracy, the main narrator is a young boy living in the Stateway Gardens projects with his half-brother Jacob and his single mother who works hard to keep them fed and safe. Tracy is her "smart son" and Jacob is the "pretty one" and this designation by their mother seems to be self-fulfilling prophecy as Tracy takes a more straight and narrow approach and Jacob struggles. Eloquently written and impressive in its honesty of the issues faced in project life in social, economic and racial inequalities. Especially poignant was the description of the harrowing trip to a nearby college where the grass is lush and green and the boys consider themselves on "vacation." Because the plot is not linear, and the time sequence jumps around a bit, I personally had a harder time staying engaged, but was glad I stuck with it.… (mais)

This is a collection of tightly linked short stories about a curious, intelligent boy named Tracy, growing up in a Chicago housing project with his older brother and his mother. Stateway Gardens is both a trap and a community. A place with fantastic views of Lake Michigan and Comiskey Park that segregates its residents from the city around them. In these stories, Tracy follows his brother around, skips school and endures his first bus ride to a new, more academically challenging school. His brother loves his high school girlfriend, but can't quite get up the courage to leave familiar surroundings. His mother works more than one job, always waiting for the promised raise, the letter that will let them move out of there, the man who will stay.

Jasmon Drain's debut is a work that examines life in a place that no longer exists and is peopled with very human characters. It's such a lame cliché to claim that a place is a central character, but Drain fills his stories with such vivid descriptions of the stairways and apartments, the particular scant brown grass, the sounds that filter through Tracy's bedroom window, and which he will later desperately miss, that the comparison becomes unavoidable.

While this debut sometimes felt like a first novel, the writing was solid and there is something to it. I'm eager to see what this author writes next.… (mais)

The short stories in this collection are linked via Tracy and his older half-brother as they come of age at the end of the 20th century in Stateway Gardens, one of Chicago’s now-demolished high-rise public housing projects.

Navigating adults and poverty and sex, they’re fascinated by life outside Stateway; but later on, living elsewhere and even after the buildings have been demolished, the site still occupies them. Their vulnerability breaks my heart in nearly every story, yet there is tenacity and optimism in their keen observations. As an aside, the author’s Acknowledgment is the most heartfelt I’ve read.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)… (mais)