While reimagining an abandoned warehouse into an ethereal portal toward otherworlds, a Dominican teenager asks herself: “What if life was as ugly as it was beautiful, as bleak as it was hopeful?” This question concludes “Great American Scream Machine,” and serves as a driving force for the following sixteen stories in Annell López’s debut collection, I’ll Give You a Reason. Throughout her collection López paints an intimate portrait of Ironbound, an immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, while contemplating contemporary America through the lens of Dominican immigrants and the people they encounter.

The stories in I’ll Give You a Reason offer a rare sensitivity, each uncovering hard truths without risking callousness or cruelty. An early favorite, “Dark Vader,” follows a young woman helping her eight-year-old younger sister reckon with the rampant colorism on her elementary school playground, all whilst navigating contentious relationships with her overworked mother and her sexually promiscuous boss. The stories here prove themselves as delicate and methodical balancing acts, breaching topics such as race, sexuality, immigration status, grief, desire, and belonging.

López’s great skill is evident in how she tactfully handles each subject, not in isolation, but with regards to how they intersect with—and subsequently modify—one another in achingly authentic ways. In “Bear Hunting Season” we witness how a widow’s grief complicates her sexuality and insecurity as she navigates a blooming relationship with a heartbroken bear hunter. In the captivatingly tense “What Is Yours,” a daughter confronts the racism of her mother while holding back thoughts of killing her assaulter—the same man that her unsuspecting mother is currently seeing. Later, heavy-hitters like “The Other Carmen” and “Worry Bees” are unmooring in their timeliness, inspecting how the social conditioning of modern America (on- and offline) can have indelible consequences on our psyches.

From its title, I’ll Give You a Reason might seem like a threatening dare at first glance. But with the compassion that is increasingly apparent with each subsequent story, it’s clear that López is imparting to her readers a sustenance that is both deliberate and benevolent. So what if life is as ugly as it is beautiful, as bleak as it is hopeful? In her collection, López doesn’t just give us a reason to keep going—she gives us seventeen, each a story wrapped in ribbons of honesty and desire that inspire resilience in an unforgiving world.

I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López, Feminist Press, $16.95

Jalen Giovanni Jones is a Black and Filipino writer from Los Angeles, and is currently attending Louisiana State University's MFA in Creative Writing. He is the fiction editor for the New Delta Review, an editor for Mixed Asian Media, and directed the 2024 Delta Mouth Literary Festival. Jalen’s creative work has been published in The Offing, has won the David Madden MFA Award for Fiction, and will be supported by the Tin House Workshop and the Lambda Literary Retreat this summer.