One might expect Crystal to protest this arbitrarily incendiary move (she reads W. Lee, and the recently opened Stonewall Jackson High (again, flashing neon: the football field is rumored to be a Civil War graveyard). Lee Is Dead.” “Same rules, new languages.” To hype up a big game, the school board hatches a rivalry between Crystal’s school, Robert E. “This was the new New South,” observes Crystal, the teenage heroine of the searingly honest “Robert E. Equally economical is her treatment of place: these stories range over the Eastern Seaboard, settling often in the mid-Atlantic states, where one character crashes at her family home on what remains of property “once large enough that it meant something for black people to own it.”Įvans hits a deep vein just below the Mason-Dixon, especially in her exploration of how an immigrant population has tangled the color line. She humanizes her characters with swift accuracy (Laura once “couldn’t say ‘Blow Pop’ because she thought it sounded dirty”).

Lines like this jar because Evans is otherwise so sagacious. but not the basic mechanical processes of actual pleasure.” One character, looking after her 14-year-old cousin (Grandfather is dying, Mother is at a church retreat), sums it up heartbreakingly well: “I feel kind of sorry for her entire generation, because they’ve learned all the theatrical parts of sex so they walk around pouting and posing. (The notion that “we are safe, with our families, until we are not” is a preoccupation here.) In Evans’s world, virginity is a card to play quickly and strategically. (Her few male characters orbit closely around sisters, girlfriends and daughters.) Rather than limiting the collection’s gaze, this perspective amplifies the universal pitfalls of coming of age in 21st-century America.Īt a store in the mall, “girls 3 and up could get manicures.” Parents, whether two subway stops away or on a research trip in Brazil, are unaware of their transgressions.

They evoke the thrill of an all-night conversation with your hip, frank, funny college roommate.Įvans follows girls and young women who are intelligent, gutsy and black.

Told from a close distance, these stories lack the rich patina of hindsight, their pleasures coming instead from an immediacy and an engaging voice.

Danielle Evans’s whip-smart first story collection charts the liminal years between childhood and the condition dubiously known as being a grown-up.

Before you suffocate your own fool self