Ian Williams, The Guardian
‘As the underdog against the monstrous antagonists of racism and poverty, morality becomes extra weight when Trelawny is in survival mode, hanging on to an unethical job for the privilege of “a toilet on which to sit and unload your twisted, clogged-up colon”. It’s hard to like Trelawny at his most unscrupulous. And then one remembers that Black people should not have to be heroic in order to live ordinary lives. In the final pages, the collection surges with the symphonic, imaginative, propulsive energy of Gabriel García Márquez into a vision of a possible future for Trelawny. We find ourselves resisting it because our fate is wrapped up in his, and we trust that Escoffery will not flatten his characters – or us – into statistics.’
Andrew Martin, The New York Times
‘Given Escoffery’s skill in making me care for these characters, I wished at times that I was caught more forcefully in a current of narrative momentum with them, and some episodes (as when poor Cukie ends up in an overheated slice of Florida noir) struck me as less than convincing. But the author is, throughout, a gifted, sure-footed storyteller, with a command of evocative language and perfectly chosen details. He wields a disarming, irreverent sense of humor, as when Trelawney’s brother tells him he’s “been acting like a bum.” “I took no offense,” Escoffery writes, “but clarified, I identify as dispossessed.” It could be this writer’s credo, and it’s the kind of line that makes me eager to read him for a long time to come.’
Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
‘Escoffery’s fiction is marked by ingenuity. The eight stories in If I Survive You employ the first, second, and third person, as well as the past, present, and future tense. One tale unfolds in Jamaican patois; another dips in and out of Black American idioms. There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free. His technical exuberance stands in stark contrast to his subject matter, which can feel hopeless, a litany of the cruelties that people in straitened circumstances visit upon one another.’