Brightest Young Things

all words: Carly Loman

Inspired by our end-of-year laments of not reading enough in 2011, BYT as a collective decided to take things into our own carpel-tunneled-from-too-much-internet hands and start reading more, as a whole. So, every week (and sometimes more than once a week) we commit to reviewing a book we think you'd love. Cool? Cool. Feel free to post reading suggestions for us in the comments.

• BOOK TITLE: Drown by Junot Díaz
• BOOK TYPE: Short stories
• YOU MAY ENJOY THIS IF YOU LIKED: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

REVIEW: Junot Díaz’s collection of short stories, Drown offers readers bite-sized glimpses into the lives of displaced Dominicans reconciling their past lives with their new ones—in Jersey.

Díaz’s ten stories focus around a diverse group of characters including a sticky-fingered deliveryman, a lovesick drug dealer, and a carsick child—all Dominican. As you may expect, many of the stories center around people living less than comfortable lives. And yet Díaz’s stories are not simply melancholy portraits of the disenfranchised. Instead, Díaz gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly where other writers may have only given us the ugly. Through lyrical writing and honest characterization, Díaz’s portrayals are strikingly real.

Take, for example, how Díaz describes an encounter that takes place right on our own I-95 between Ramón, a man who has just made it into America illegally, and a police officer. The Virginian officer asks the man how far he is going along the highway. Ramón responds, “New York…carefully omitting the Nueva and the Yol.”

Less humorous, but equally poignant characterization comes from the perspective of a child in the story “Fiesta, 1980.” Díaz writes,“Tía looked a ton like Mami; the two of them were both short and light-skinned. Tía smiled a lot and that was what set them apart the most.”

Little tidbits like these are what make the stories in Drown the type that stay with you.

Read it and weep. (And laugh a little bit, too.)

• NEXT BOOK I PLAN TO READ: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Previously in BYT BOOK CLUB:

• 4/25: BYT Book Club: East Of The West by Miroslav Penkov
• 4/11: BYT Book Club: Another Bullshit Night In Suck City by Nick Flynn
• 4/4: BYT Book Club: Salvage The Bones by Jesmyn Ward
• 3/28: Namedrop: Books That Will Get You Laid
• 3/21: BYT Book Club: Hipster Authors to Namedrop When You're a Hipster, Too
• 3/14: BYT Book Club: "Shalimar the Clown" by Salman Rushdie
• 3/7: BYT Book Club: "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami
• 2/29: BYT Book Club: White Girl Problems by Babe Walker
• 2/22: BYT Book Club: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• 2/15: BYT Book Club: "Just Kids" by Patti Smith