Get ready for a harsh world of drug dealers, broken families, one night stands, male prostitution, unemployment and everyday monotony in which everyone would do whatever it takes to get the hell out of their working class neighborhood in Houston. Opportunities for work are scarce and gentrification is not making it any easier. Codified conversations leave you in a void and people are saying a lot by saying very little. This is a story in which everything seems to be running in circles.
I expected a lot of this book – I always do – but must confess that in the beginning of my reading I was slightly disappointed. Not for the fact that the novel introduces you to a fairly large gallery of people, but because I had the feeling that I was only going to get to know very little about each of them. In the end I realized that this was perhaps the point after all, in a world that unfolds in fragments and painfully stagnating lives in which the balance between love and hope and disappointment is most fragile. Perhaps the charm of Bryan Washington’s debut novel is exactly there! His pen did leave a mark on me and now I’m looking forward to more stories by him.
