LOT - Bryan Washington

"Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community
in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice.

In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.

This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighbourhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra."

I feel this is a truly important book, that highlights difficult questions and intersections of identity, but one that I didn't enjoy. It's a short book with just 220 pages which hold a number of interconnected short stories that are all set in Houston, Texas. We always circle back to the same young narrator and his family but his chapters are interspersed with those of other people in the neighbourhood, usually also young, queer men. I really enjoyed the first few stories since they skilfully set the tone, introduced me to the narrator's world and created a sense of belonging. But the more I read the more settled became the feeling of hopelessness and isolation. The characters are lost, don't dare to dream, have nowhere to go and become cold, cruel and bitter. And what is even worse is knowing that many of these stories are real. 

While I didn't love all of the stories, some really stuck with me, including: "Alief," in which a community reveals a neighbour's affair to her husband but is unprepared for the destruction that this revelation might cause. This one really stuck with me, and I just adored the choice of writing the apartment block as if itself was a living breathing entity. However, much of the prose was quite raw and unbeautiful. 

For some reason I did feel emotional distance from these characters. I’m still trying to figure out where that distance comes from – perhaps it’s because our narrators are men and that distance is Washington showing how toxic masculinity, racism and the brutality of trying to survive in a system designed against you has come to harm men of colour's emotional landscape. Because none of these characters where even close to lovable, or even nice, really.

Age Rating 16+. Mature content.