Set in the richly diverse Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, the seventeen stories in Annell López’s smart and compelling debut collection engage with identity, racism, family, self-worth, and intimacy. Her characters range from Dominican immigrants like herself to white gentrifiers, and from tweens to the nearly middle-aged. Virtually all are on trajectories that ride a fine line between hope and hopelessness. 

Most of the time, Ironbound is just home, but it sometimes takes on elements of the characters’ attitudes toward their own prospects and those of others. In “The World as We Know It,” Eddie, half of a gentrifying white couple, describes Ironbound micro-aggressively, or at least self-pityingly:

Though the Ironbound was quite diverse, white people were outnumbered, or underrepresented, however you want to put it. On any given day you could encounter over a dozen different nationalities easily, though not the generic white Americans (like Joy and me) that everyone loved to hate. 

The narrator of “The Fake Wife,” an unmoored veteran gripped by malaise, is drawn to emphasize entirely different details when he describes Ironbound to the woman he will eventually marry and bring there: “Newark can be very congested and polluted,” he tells her. “Sometimes at dawn, a stench rises into the air. Toxic fumes, I guess. Parking is a nightmare too.” In both cases, the way the characters describe the Ironbound says at least as much about themselves as the place and their hopes for both.

In the characters too, hope and hopelessness are often juxtaposed. In “The Other Carmen,” the teenaged narrator’s hopelessness, stemming from body image and self-esteem issues, is exacerbated by her dismissive treatment by an unkind friend. When Carmen discovers that she has the same name as an internet porn star, she begins to imagine what “the other Carmen” would do in her place, this “porn star who not only had my exact first and last name but also looked so much like me. Her dark skin, wide hips, big breasts, and her fat stomach.” The other Carmen’s apparent comfort and delight in her own body embolden the real Carmen to imagine different, more hopeful outcomes for herself, even if she isn’t quite ready to enact them.

Hopelessness is strident in “What Is Yours,” in which a child fantasizes about killing her mother’s latest partner. She resents Jeffry because it is her mother’s negligence that makes his care necessary, but the fact that the narrator is multiracial, while this man and her mother are both white and racist, doesn’t help. Jeffrey dotes on the mother through the darkest throes of her drug addiction, until she abandons them both. By this point, we’ve plunged so far into the depths of hopelessness we don’t expect the late turn toward hope, when this long-detested, not-quite-stepfather steps up at last.

In “Great American Scream Machine,” Eva, a high school student, has just learned she’s undocumented and fears this status will destroy her future. Her initial hopelessness pushes her out of complacency and into new situations, shifting her perspective and leading her to wonder, “What if she didn’t have to live a life on the margins, like scribbles on the side of a page? What if this wasn’t the end of the world?” These essential questions articulate the themes of hope and hopelessness that López threads throughout.

One standout story,“Bear Hunting Season,” focuses on Nina who, grieving the death of her husband, develops the revolting habit of dipping into her husband’s cremains, which she stashes by her bed, and “massaging the ashes against the tips of her fingers like grains of sand” before finally licking them, “gagging at the strange but comforting taste, and at the thought of her sickness—the compulsion she’d succumbed to after her body demanded what remained of him, like a sort of latent nutrient deficiency.” Hope arrives when she joins a dating site for widows and meets a man she actually likes. But then, during a bear hunting trip, an adventure that has already pushed Nina outside her comfort zone, the man asks her to wear a piece of his dead wife’s clothing during sex. She does, and the sex ends badly. But confronting, in someone else, a grief as visceral and encompassing as her own eases her burden, fulfilling the story’s earlier promise of hope. 

In the title story, the narrator’s mother’s internalized threat, “What do you have to cry for? I’ll give you a reason,” sets her up to distrust Maria, her needy, weepy fifth-grade classmate. “This was back when Mom was buying me outfits two sizes too small. That year I was hungry all the time,” a harsh reality that might further explain why skinny Maria’s “tears lit me up like a flare gun.” As she steals little items from Maria, her hopelessness is shaded with overtones of bullying. Hope is in the air when Maria invites the narrator over one afternoon. Both girls would seem to benefit from forming a friendship, but Maria dashes that hope when she confronts the narrator about the thefts with surprisingly icy fierceness.

Each story seems to echo Eva’s questions in “Great American Scream Machine”: “What if life was as ugly as it was beautiful, as bleak as it was hopeful?” What if hope and hopelessness are parts of the same thing? These questions are as pertinent for these characters as they are for us in this divisive moment.

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Annell López is a Dominican immigrant. A 2022 Peter Taylor fellow, she has received support from Tin House and the Kenyon Review Workshops. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. López is an Assistant Fiction Editor for New Orleans Review and holds an MFA at the University of New Orleans. I’ll Give You a Reason won the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. She is working on a novel.

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Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better (Cornerstone Press, 2023). Her debut novel, Without You Here, is forthcoming from Flexible Press in September. Her writing has appeared in Gargoyle, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Atticus Review, Writer’s Digest, Electric Literature, CRAFT, and Arts & Letters, among others. A teacher at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, she also writes and edits for Virginia Wine & Country Life and Charlottesville Family Magazine, and serves as assistant fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review.