The title of “J’ouvert, 1996” refers to an all-night revel originating at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza during which a teenage boy, his wide-eyed younger brother in tow, intends to find, and assert, a grown-up self. This story shares with the others a preoccupation with characters’ reckoning with unfulfilled promises and unrecognized possibilities. Upon finding the house his camp is visiting to be “a bigger version of the apartment where lived,” Freddy begins to wonder whether real life “spoke…to what his imagination guarded”: that there may be more potential for wonder and mystery beyond his dream life. In “I Happy Am,” one of nine tales Brinkley spins here about dreamers constricted or confounded by realities, Freddy is a young black boy from the Bronx who, at least for the length of the trip his summer camp is taking to the suburbs, imagines himself as a superpowered robot. An assured debut collection of stories about men and women, young and old, living and loving along the margins in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
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