Stateway's Garden

December 15, 2019
A collection of linked short stories takes readers inside life in Chicago's Stateway Gardens projects. This debut book is set mostly in the 1980s in one of the South Side's largest, most segregated housing projects. Stateway Gardens' eight high-rise apartment blocks (built in the 1950s and demolished by 2007) formed a neighborhood notorious for grinding poverty, violence, drug use, and crime. Drain, who grew up in Chicago, writes intimately of the human experiences of those who lived there. The stories are linked by a group of characters who are relatives and friends of a pair of brothers, Tracy and Jacob. Tracy narrates several of the stories, beginning with "B.B. Sauce," which takes place when he's 6 years old. He's the younger brother, "my mother's smart child, but Jacob was the handsome one with the precious button nose and eyelashes that flapped like dove wings." Their rivalry will play out for years. Neither boy's father is in the picture, and several of the stories revolve around the heartbreaking irony of a single mother who works so many hours and jobs to support her children that she has no time to be with them. For Tracy, though, that's just one of the realities of his world. It's a world so harshly limited that in "Wet Paper Grass," Tracy, Jacob, and their friend Jameel undertake a harrowing journey just to hang out on a community college campus miles away: "It was our summer resort....We imagined ourselves as those rich North Side white kids being sent to European cities we'd never manage to spell." But just getting there puts eight-year-old Tracy in mortal peril. In "The Stateway Condo Gentrification," teenage Tracy--still the smart one--realizes that in some ways living in the projects is "no different than living in those condos that weren't more than four miles north of us on Michigan Avenue....You could see the entire city from our fourteenth-floor ramp." It turns out to be a prescient observation. Drain writes with fierce warmth about characters coping with crushing racism and poverty in this impressive debut.

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December 23, 2019
Drain’s resonant debut tracks a community’s hardscrabble struggle in the Stateway Gardens housing project on Chicago’s South Side from the 1980s through the project’s closure in the early 2000s. Loosely connected stories revolve around Tracy—dubbed “the smart child” by his mother—and his older half-brother, Jacob (“the handsome one”), an eventual high school dropout who Tracy looks up to before choosing his own path and joining the Marines. “B.B. Sauce” introduces Tracy and Jacob and their working mom (“Nothing was more important than the way she looked. That was her moneymaker”), who strives to make ends meet. In “Solane,” a single mother of two other boys hopes for a better life for her younger sister, Stephanie, whom she lives with, while Jacob is humbled by a pregnancy scare in “Shifts,” and Tracy has a tender coming-of-age moment in “The Tornado Moat.” In “Love-able Lip Gloss,” Jacob, now a young adult, cheats on his wife with Stephanie, his first love from childhood and now a cocaine addict. An epilogue describes the actual project’s development and eventual demolition while commenting on the legacy of segregation and the area’s present-day gentrification. This bold outing vividly encapsulates a chapter of Chicago’s complex history.

December 15, 2019
In a Chicago housing project in the 1990s, electrifed "L" trains thundering by, characters seek soft shelter in these powerfully felt, interconnected stories from debut author Drain. The core of the collection is young Tracy, his mother's "smart child" and little brother to "pretty son" Jacob. Tracy accompanies his musician father on tour and begins to understand his mother's odd behavior. He starts middle school in "a faraway weird and different school" full of white kids; he imagines the suburban life his mother dreams of for them. As a teenager, Jacob falls for Stephanie, who lives nearby with her sister, Solane, and Drain fills in a vaster web: Solane hesitates to tell a new love interest where she lives; Jacob and Stephanie's love is tested early. Capturing an intricate portrait of Stateway Gardens (a real place that was razed in 2007), Drain mines the idea that life in the projects could be both a thing to escape and something to nurture, a matter made more critical by the ticking clock of gentrification. A deep, vibrant collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)