About.com Rating



Riverhead, September 2010

In her impressive literary debut, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, author Danielle Evans emerges as a smart, funny and strong new voice in fiction. Readers of this story collection will find themselves alternating between laughing out loud and trying to fight off tears as Evans's characters navigate through the rough waters of their existence.

All of the stories in this collection capture some aspect of what it's like to be young and African-American or of mixed race in the modern world.

And while most of them focus on the experience of a female character, their plots move in a variety of ways and take surprising turns, morphing into stories that are shocking or tragic or just plain honest in the end.

This collection's opening story "Virgins" was published in The Paris Review in 2007, when Evans was only 23. It's the story of two teenagers coming to terms with their sexuality and the new risks and liabilities that come along with it. In Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, "Virgins" sets up several of the themes that resurface throughout the collection, and it's hopeful that this story's early success foreshadows only more good things to come from Evans in the future.

In "Harvest," Evans furthers the theme of emerging sexuality with a group of college-aged women who struggle to understand their reproductive potential and define their moral limitations. One young woman must decide what to do about her unexpected pregnancy, while another sells her genetic material as an egg donor to support herself.

These two lives become intertwined in a surprising way when one confides in the other, and the result is a well-balanced story that digs into deeper issues of race, class, and gender.

In "Snakes," a young mixed-race woman narrates the story of how one summer she spent with her grandmother changed her family forever, and in "Robert E. Lee is Dead," an intelligent high-school student tries to find her way in the still deeply divided South. "Someone Ought to Tell Her There's Nowhere to Go" profiles a soldier's difficult return from Iraq, and "The King of a Vast Empire" - the only story in this collection narrated by a male voice - involves a holiday roadtrip that brings two siblings together.

In each of these stories, Evans gives her readers something that extends well beyond the entertainment value of a story well told. And these stories are, to be sure, very well told. But the lives of these characters also seem to reach out from the pages of this collection to connect with us and challenge us in ways we might not expect.

Anyone, for example, who's struggling to break free from a tragic past will understand the advice that one soldier gives to another: "you didn't get to pick your ghosts, your ghosts picked you." And when one young woman wants to warn another, her advice might as well be heeded by all: "Don't push too hard; your last chance to see a person the way you wanted them to be may come at any moment."

With only eight stories, the range of this collection might feel a bit limited to some. While a variety of experience is represented here, sometimes the trajectory of one story may seem to alter only slightly from the next. By the end of the collection, these stories start to feel the same, but a little different, instead of each offering an entirely fresh perspective.

Evans's tendency to repeat similar characteristics in different characters may add to this effect. Three different women, for example, admit that they don't like to accompany others to the abortion clinic, and young, intelligent African-American women feature predominately in the majority of these stories.

For others, these similarities in theme and content might not seem repetitive but rather be what enables certain aspects of the collection to stand out. Evans has done great justice to her characters and her readers in highlighting these people who keep on living despite the gulf that exists between who they are and who they want to be.



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.