On the Come Up

Sixteen year old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. She wants nothing more than to be on the come up - to be successful so that she can take care of her family. This book is a love letter to Rap and Hip Hop, an example of the importance of fighting for your dreams when the odds are heavily stacked against you, and really opened my eyes to the realities of poor and working-class black teenagers in America.

"You'll never silence me and you'll never kill my dream,
Just recognize when you say brilliant that you're also saying Bri."

I am guessing that this book won’t be as well received as THUG was. Bri is harder to like than Starr was. She can be rude, impulsive, quick to anger and at times seems to easily fall into the behaviour of ‘hoodlum’ (one of many words used to describe her in the book). While Bri does not watch her friend get murdered by a cop the way Starr did, she does get unfairly targeted by school security. She watches her mother (a drug addict now eight years sober) struggle to find a new job. She goes hungry when they couldn’t afford to buy food, and is cold when their gas is turned off. She watches as her smart, hardworking older brother has to give up grad school to make minimum wage selling pizza. Her life is hard and she is angry about it. She raps about it, she rants about it, and she gets in fights about it.

“It is kinda messed up. Here my brother is, doing everything right, and nothing's coming from it. Meanwhile, Aunt Pooh's doing everything we've been told not to do, and she's giving us food when we need it.
That's how it goes though. The drug dealers in my neighborhood aren't struggling. Everybody else is.”

I can see why some people may not like her, but Bri is a complex, flawed person and I loved her so much for that. She loves Star Wars, while also rapping about guns and violence, she wears tweety bird slippers but gets in fights with whoever tries to keep her down. She pushes people away because she thinks that is what it will take to help them, and she struggles to succeed in a world that wants to keep her down because she is black, and a girl.

On the Come Up may be a YA book, (and so many adults seem to hate the idea of reading books written for young adults) but it’s one that I will suggest to anyone. It has everything you might want from a novel – family relationships, romance, the importance of friendships – the support they can offer and the pain they can cause, insight into the music industry (the author was a teenage rapper much like the story’s lead), and is such a powerful insight into the systemic racism that is still so prevalent today (and not just in America). Angie Thomas tells a powerful story in this novel, and I can’t wait to read what she does next.

Posted by Sas

Catalogue link: On the Come Up