This is a wonderful new YA novel by the author of, and set in the same community as, bestseller The Hate U Give. While On the Come Up is not as obviously tied to specific current events as T.H.U.G. (which dealt with the aftermath of a police officer shooting an unarmed black youth), it is a very timely coming of age story in which racism, poverty, violence and the struggle to find your own path and express your own creativity is explored through an engaging and likeable main character and a rich supporting cast.
Thomas may be drawing on her own autobiographical story here a little bit, since she herself was a rapper before she was a bestselling author, and the novel focuses on 16-year-old Bri, a talented young rapper who dreams of making it big. In a family and a neighbourhood rife with poverty and constantly threatened by gang violence, Bri discovers there are many possible paths to “making it” — and she has to decide what that’s going to look like for her. She is thrust unwillingly into the public eye when she is targeted by the security guards at her school in an incident of racial profiling — and has to decide if she can use that incident to propel her music career, and what she will do with the platform she’s unexpectedly been handed.
Thomas has a gift for creating characters so vivid, so believable and real that they pull middle-aged, middle-class white ladies like me into the world inhabited by girls like Bri and their friends and families. I could not put this book down and raced through it in barely more than a day. Yes, the novel has important things to say about racism and politics — but it’s also so incredibly well-written, enjoyable and entertaining that there’s no sense of it ever feeling preachy or didactic. I can’t wait for what she writes next.
Reading Lockhart’s We Were Liars was an amazing, almost overwhelming experience for me a couple of years ago, so I had high expectations for Genuine Fraud and picked it up as soon as it was available.
Genuine Fraud is a thriller, a genre I don’t normally read much because I don’t usually find them, well, all that thrilling. I was drawn into this book not only because I trusted the author, but because I found the main character, Jule, intriguing (though by no means likable — liking her is not the point) and I wanted to know how she got into the situation she was in as the novel opened, and what secrets she was hiding. The novel’s unusual structure — essentially the story is told in reverse chronology, each chapter taking us a little further back into Jule’s story to explain what happened — kept me turning pages through this quick read.
Because of We Were Liars, I expected a big twist at the end and kept trying to guess what it would be (thus making the plot even more complicated in my head than it actually was). But there isn’t one bit surprise reveal; there are a series of gradual reveals along the way that all add up to a genuinely intriguing thriller.
The two main criticisms I’ve seen of this book are that 1) some of the things Jule gets away with are pretty implausible, which I think is true but also probably true of most mysteries and thrillers, and 2) it is not inspired by, but far too closely modelled on, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. As I haven’t read that book, I can’t comment on that, but I will say that if you cite another author’s novel in your afterword as being a major inspiration, you do need to at least make sure there are significant differences between your work and theirs. Otherwise, you might just want to say that your book is a modernized, gender-swapped retelling (told in reverse) of a classic thriller. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you’re clear that’s what you’re doing.
Angie Thomas’s excellent novel The Hate You Give came my way, as many good YA novels do, via a recommendation from my teenaged daughter. It’s a story about a sixteen-year-old African-American girl who is in the car with a boy — her best friend from childhood — when he is pulled over and shot by a white police officer in a traffic stop gone horribly wrong. As the only witness to Khalil’s death, Starr finds herself pulled into the centre of controversy and activism in her community.
Like many teenage protagonists in fiction, Starr is a bit of an outsider: she doesn’t entirely fit in with the white kids at her private school, though she has friends and a boyfriend there; she also no longer fully fits in with her childhood friends and extended family in her lower-income neighbourhood, simply because her parents have made it possible for her to attend private school. (This dynamic reminded me a little of the narrator in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian).
“It’s about way more than [Khalil] though….
I was reading this book on the same day the verdict was handed down in the Philando Castile case, finding the officer who killed him not guilty despite the horrifying video evidence. For the record, the list above, where Thomas integrates her fictional character into a list of real victims, was the exact spot where I started crying while reading The Hate U Give.
We’re long past the era (if we were ever really in it; I’m not sure) when readers can assume that a subject is treated with less complexity because the novel is targeted at teenaged readers. This YA novel delves deep into the gray areas around the black-and-white issue of young African-American men dying at the hands of police. Starr faces the covert racism of her white classmates who think they’re being progressive by organizing a day of protest over Khalil’s murder; she faces the real and constant threats of gang violence and drug abuse within her own community. Her uncle, a black police officer, is at once sympathetic to the stresses faced by his colleagues, and outraged by what one of them did to Khalil. Issues that, for many of us, are only theoretical because they are so removed from the communities where we live, take on human faces here. Like every great novel, The Hate U Give is not really about “issues” even when it is — it’s about people. Novels resonate because their characters feel like people we know, or can know. Starr brings us into her world, and into the horrible experience she has lived through, and readers are richer for making this journey with her.
It’s hard to believe I had never read this famously gloomy (and funny) series of kids’ books, nor had my children. They’re right in line with the sort of thing we had all over the house when the kids were schoolaged, and would have been a blast to read out loud, but somehow, having picked up the first one once or twice, I never really got into them. What convinced me to finally start the series was the recent TV adaptation starring Neil Patrick Harris as Count Olaf, which has such a lovely, gloomy, quirky tone that I watched it in a couple of days and then really wanted to go back to the source material (the TV series covers, I think, the first four books of a thirteen-book series, so presumably they’re planning three seasons? Not sure).
The books are, as the narrator warns over and over, incredibly gloomy — a lot of really awful things happen to the Baudelaire orphans. Most of them are cartoonish, like Count Olaf dangling Sunny from the top of a tower in a cage, so you don’t really feel the empathy you would in a more realistic story. But then occasionally something genuinely realistic happens, like when Count Olaf hits Klaus in the face and he has a bruise for days, and you think, this is really a story about child abuse, even though it’s cartoonish and often funny. The humour comes in the narrative voice, which constantly reminds us to put the book down if we enjoy stories with happy endings. I do enjoy stories with happy endings, and I’ve been warned enough that this won’t be one, but I’m probably going to keep reading anyway!