All the Water I've Seen Is Running

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.

April 15, 2021
A gay New Yorker revisits his Florida roots to reckon with death, family, and old bigotries. Daniel, the narrator of Rodriques' assured debut, is finding his way as a high school teacher in New York and struggling to keep a relationship when he gets some bad news: Aubrey, a high school friend, has died in a car crash near where they grew up in North Florida. The incident calls up a host of tender memories: She was one of the few White people in his high school who seemed comfortable with him as a Black man. But the incident also surfaces a host of identity crises: Daniel's North Florida adolescence was the crucible of his sexuality as well as his family heritage, a long line of slavery, violence, and abuse stretching back to his family's native Jamaica. Plotwise, the novel is a coming-of-age story with something of the tenor of a mystery: Daniel returns to Florida to sort out why Aubrey was in a car with Brandon, an abusive and hard-drinking ex-boyfriend. But the novel's tension comes from Daniel's struggle to navigate the emotional and cultural baggage he brings on the trip. Just as Daniel code-switches depending on whether he's talking with his Black friends, gay men, poor Whites, or Jamaican relatives, the narrative alternates among the brightness of his memories of Aubrey, dark recollections of how his mother and grandmother were treated, and his present-day confrontations with those who knew Aubrey, including Brandon, and a general feeling of being adrift and rootless. (A reference to The Odyssey is on-point.) The tail end of the book, which turns on Daniel's emotional purging, runs at a somewhat disappointing low boil considering the visceral incidents that precede it. But Rodriques brings a lyrical touch to his hero's inner life, making his past pains and present-day heartbreaks feel bone-deep. A well-turned exploration of how intensely place and history shape our identities.

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May 15, 2021
Daniel Henriquez hears of the death of his high-school love, Aubrey, and travels back from New York to North Florida to come to terms with his sense of tremendous loss over this long-neglected relationship. This study of grief illuminates Daniel's sense of himself, his family, and his communal identity. As the mixed-race, queer son of Jamaican immigrants, he is shaped not just by his adolescent experiences in the American South but also by his ancestry. Rodriques writes with a dreaminess that reflects Daniel's preoccupations with the intersection of memory and reality, past and present. A drunken drive down a coastal highway with friends and a favorite playlist express a poignant and powerful, thoughtful yet drifting state of mind. Rodriques delves into themes of identity and the extent to which the characters, including Desmond, Jess, Twig, and Egypt, are able to chart their sense of belonging. The complex layering of class, race, gender, and sexuality within the group reminds us that all is at play in relationships. Rodriques' striking debut expands the geography of regional literature and convincingly demands acknowledgment of under-explored perspectives.

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