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All the Water I've Seen Is Running

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Former high school classmates reckon with the death of a friend in this stunning debut novel.
Along the Intracoastal waterways of North Florida, Daniel and Aubrey navigated adolescence with the electric intensity that radiates from young people defined by otherness: Aubrey, a self-identified "Southern cracker" and Daniel, the mixed-race son of Jamaican immigrants. When the news of Aubrey's death reaches Daniel in New York, years after they'd lost contact, he is left to grapple with the legacy of his precious and imperfect love for her. At ease now in his own queerness, he is nonetheless drawn back to the muggy haze of his Palm Coast upbringing, tinged by racism and poverty, to find out what happened to Aubrey. Along the way, he reconsiders his and his family's history, both in Jamaica and in this place he once called home.
Buoyed by his teenage track-team buddies ? Twig, a long-distance runner; Desmond, to sprinter; Egypt, Des's girlfriend; and Jess, a chef ? Daniel begins a frantic search for meaning in Aubrey's death, recklessly confronting the drunken country boy he believes may have killed her. Sensitive to the complexities of class, race, and sexuality both in the American South and in Jamaica, All the Water I've Seen Is Running is a novel of uncommon tenderness, grief, and joy. All the while, it evokes the beauty and threat of the place Daniel calls home ? where the river meets the ocean.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 12, 2021
      Rodriques’s fresh and rhapsodic debut follows a group of Florida high school friends who reunite to rediscover the ties that still bind them. Though their lives have diverged since graduation—“so much of the future became the past so quickly”—the friends, some Black, some white, meet again after seven years when Daniel, a Jamaican American teacher living with his boyfriend in Brooklyn, returns to his hometown of Jacksonville. He’s come to mourn his first love, a self-proclaimed redneck girl named Aubrey, who was killed in a truck crash with her drunk ex-boyfriend Brandon. Daniel reconnects with his teammates on the track team, Twig, Des, and Des’s girlfriend, Egypt; and Aubrey’s best friend, Jess. They drink and reminisce, but things get out of hand when Des and Daniel drive out to Brandon’s place to confront him. The lilting cadence of the friends’ dialogue as they contemplate what lies ahead adds particular resonance, as do Daniel’s reflections (“They guarded me because they weren’t sure they were going to get out of Palm Coast themselves. But if I escaped, we all did”). This melancholy story is a startling and necessary addition to the canon of works that parse what it means to grow up in the American South.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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