Drown
Diaz's debut introduced a new voice to American literature, code-switching between Spanish and English, Dominican and American, masculine and vulnerable. The story "Ysrael" is a haunting opener that announces a major talent.
The closing story, How to Date a Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie, reads to some as an unfinished sketch that sets up more than it pays off. The title story's darker turn lands as a tonal outlier against the rest of the collection too. Kirkus calls out the “casual violence and indifferent morality” running through the book, a stumbling block for anyone hoping for some redemptive arc; the review pegs the whole debut as “calculated to raise some eyebrows.” The tonal swing inside Ysrael, from brothers horsing around to sudden cruelty, reads as abrupt rather than earned to at least one reviewer. Another admits the payoff simply “didn't quite deliver from the buildup.” Not every reader signs on for the family cycle Díaz is building.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
