An engrossing collection of linked short stories taking place at Gateway Gardens on the Souhside of Chicago, a housing estate. A group of chRscters who we follow through their daily activities bcrimes that occur families that live on the estate that was built to give people housing and a better way of life.A place that is ridden with crime drugs and gangs. Captured my attention and drew me in to their lives.#netgalley#randomhouse

STATEWAY'S GARDEN by Jasmon Drain is a collection of interconnected short stories set in and near the Stateway Gardens public housing projects which stood on Chicago's South Side. We do need to add shorter works to our collection and are trying to also expand the diverse voices we share with students. Coupled with the local setting, this new set of stories from a Pushcart Prize nominated author seemed an ideal choice to consider purchasing. However, these stories, especially the early ones which begin with six-year-old Tracy accompanying his Mother to work and learning to make B.B. Sauce is a roach-infested corner store, seem unlikely to hold their attention. In the past, students have read and discussed Our America by LeAlan Jones and There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz. More recently, many of our classes have explored their interest in learning about segregation and racism through reading titles including The New Jim Crow by Alexander, The South Side by Moore, Just Mercy by Stevenson, Between the World and Me by Coates, and The Other Wes Moore. I am still looking for shorter works to share with them.

This is a collection of tightly linked short stories about a curious, intelligent boy named Tracy, growing up in a Chicago housing project with his older brother and his mother. Stateway Gardens is both a trap and a community. A place with fantastic views of Lake Michigan and Comiskey Park that segregates its residents from the city around them. In these stories, Tracy follows his brother around, skips school and endures his first bus ride to a new, more academically challenging school. His brother loves his high school girlfriend, but can't quite get up the courage to leave familiar surroundings. His mother works more than one job, always waiting for the promised raise, the letter that will let them move out of there, the man who will stay.

Jasmon Drain's debut is a work that examines life in a place that no longer exists and is peopled with very human characters. It's such a lame cliché to claim that a place is a central character, but Drain fills his stories with such vivid descriptions of the stairways and apartments, the particular scant brown grass, the sounds that filter through Tracy's bedroom window, and which he will later desperately miss, that the comparison becomes unavoidable.

While this debut sometimes felt like a first novel, the writing was solid and there is something to it. I'm eager to see what this author writes next.

Jasmon Drain’s debut work Stateway’s Gardens is a compilation of short stories bound by linked characters, Tracy and his older brother Jacob who reside with their mother in the housing project known as the Stateway’s Garden located in Southside Chicago. The stories depict the hardscrabble life of Tracy who is introduced in the first story, “BB Sauce,” as on the only day he is asked to accompany his mother to her job at a store/BBQ joint in Westside Chicago. The stories provide vivid accounts of the quotidian life in the cement, drab buildings with dead dry grass, which is dubbed “Wet Paper Grass” in a later story. The stories filled with Tracy passing through various phases of his young life as a child, a middle schooler, and finally a high school young man read as a fairly standard bildungsroman genre; however, unlike a longer novel format, the stories stand on their own.

The strength of this work lies in the second half of the book as the storylines improve and the writing becomes more poignant. For example, the story “Middle School” recounts Tracy’s first day attending a new school, which we learn is one subject of integration. Timid, yet smart, Tracy is bullied on the bus, which lands him in the principal’s office. Despite a two-week suspension, Tracy’s mother accompanies him back to the school. Though not moralizing about the circumstance, many of the stories introduce contemporary problems faced by the housing project residents such as school suspension, thus distantly evoking the school-to-prison pipeline. In Tracy’s mother, one understands the challenges she has faced and the various forms of systemic racism she has inevitably endured. Similarly in the aptly titled “The Stateway Condo Gentrification,” the same family grapples with the rumors of the razing of the housing project with promises of relocation and compensation. This story in particular gives visceral insight into the challenges in the projects such as low-level drug dealing, side jobs as steady employment, and beer guzzling youth. The descriptions of the urban housing complex in the story “The Tornado Moat” is quite memorable. The book itself suffers slightly from lack of cohesion and unevenness. The last stories illuminate many serious urban issues such as gentrification, crime, teen pregnancy, and bullying.

Engrossing. It's a well written collection of stories that will keep you happily turning the pages. Happy reading!

These linked stories bring the reader right into the lives of the inhabitants of a housing project located in the South Side, a housing project built with lofty expectations, post WWII, in which many who experienced the Great Migration attempted to set up futures. As the inevitable happened, drugs and gang warfare, the apartments were eventually razed. The stories are well told, varied in approach, and Jasmon Drain who has apparently lived most if not all his life on the South Side, breathes life into his characters, even the projects themselves.

A life told in a series of short stories, seen through the eyes of residents of Stateway Gardens. A public housing project situated adjacent to the expressway in South Side Chicago. 

I don't know how I feel about this book.

There were times when I felt extremely in touch with a character and then a few pages later I would feel completely detached.I felt as though I never really got to know any of them and it made it difficult to see the world through their eyes. 

This may be the format of the book. It was as though I never got the whole story, just small glimpses at a time, and then before I knew it, the chapter was over and we had moved on.

This book was well written, I guess I just wanted a little bit more.