There’s a palpable vision at work here, and it makes for a thematically incisive and cohesive, if occasionally redundant, collection that examines the lives of knowledgeable, highly sensitive juvenile black and biracial women (and, occasionally, men) struggling to progress beyond transient, indeterminate states of youth … The archetypical friendship between two teenage girls…is also examined here (‘Virgins,’ ‘Robert E. Lee Is Dead’) with a steady and unwavering realism that elevates these stories from more conventional studies … There is an inherent loneliness to these characters—an inability to make lasting connections with the people they most love, to bridge identities and personal history into an confident and cohesive view on the future, an apartness sometimes rendered from unconscionable failures of personal judgment and morality … A thematically potent collection, whose promise is realized by Evans’s remarkable ability to fashion dramatic, even devastating narrative moments from so-called ordinary life.
