On the Come Up

Genre: Fiction

This is the story of Bri, a sixteen year old girl, whose father was notoriously murdered by gangs when she was a baby. Bri's school is not treating the brown skinned students the same as they do the white skinned students. As a matter of fact, they're targeting Bri and some of her friends. But Bri can't tell her mom because she has other things on her mind. Bri's mother, Jay, a recovering drug addict and single mom, is doing her best to keep her family fed, clothed and sheltered on a single salary. Her big brother, Trey, is a college graduate but is working in a pizza parlor and living at home so that he can help support his family. It turns out that Bri has inherited her father's talent for writing her own raps and performing them. She's starting to get acclaim in her neighborhood and is even winning some contests. Bri dreams of making it big and helping her mother with household expenses. And then some stuff happens and Bri has to decide what is more important to her, her dreams or her family. This is a story about love, friendship and family and learning that big dreams can include all of the important people in our lives.

I've been reading a lot of book recently. Mostly books for my classes (I'm working on my Master's in Library and Information Science), but lots of books with my kids too. I'm really into novels in verse. These are stories written in verse or poetry. If you haven't tried these yet, do give them a try as they really are an art form. There are no extraneous words as when you use few (er) words, every word has to be just right. I loved this book for many reasons, but one of them was certainly because of Bri's amazing raps. I particularly love the way Thomas describes how the raps form in Bri's mind. For smackdown rap competitions and other times too, she comes up with the raps on the spot and the process usually begins with one word that leads to maelstrom of words, and from there the rap forms. It's fun to read and her words are creative and insightful! The second reason I really loved this book is that in this book, Thomas does a great job of representing a part of the African American population and their real lives (I didn't think she did such a great job in her other book with this, see my review for The Hate U Give). This is a YA novel and so expect the usual overly pronounced descriptions of feelings and thoughts that come with this genre, however, I think it's well worth the ride to get to Bri's story.