The stories in Jamel Brinkley’s second collection explore the gentrification of Brooklyn and the social changes that come with it. Sometimes serving as a backdrop and other times standing at the forefront of the narrative, these shifts in Brooklyn’s landscape are captured with exceptional sensitivity and nuance and, in every story, we see how urban transformation makes its way into the everyday lives of the characters.
 
Brinkley is an exceptional observer of a world that is changing rapidly and often harshly. He looks at various forms of relationships – friendship, familial bonds, and romantic connections – and manages to capture its complexities with care, centering the generational conflicts in Black American people. 
 
The characters and the reader are joined in the action of witnessing, which, the author seems to say, is a transcendental experience capable of bringing people together or breaking them apart and, in any case, altering them in irreversible ways. His prose is assured and precise and he builds the characters’ worlds deeply by showing little signs of intimacy, routines, their daily going-ons, and how all of these things connect to a past that does not exist anymore.