Title: On the Come Up
Release: February 7th 2019 by Walker
Genre: YA, Realistic Fiction, Contemporary
Author: Angie Thomas
My Rating: 4/ 5 Stars
Synopsis:
Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Or at least make it out of her neighborhood one day. As the daughter of an underground rap legend who died before he hit big, Bri’s got big shoes to fill. But now that her mom has unexpectedly lost her job, food banks and shutoff notices are as much a part of Bri’s life as beats and rhymes. With bills piling up and homelessness staring her family down, Bri no longer just wants to make it—she has to make it.
On the Come Up is Angie Thomas’s homage to hip-hop, the art that sparked her passion for storytelling and continues to inspire her to this day. It is the story of fighting for your dreams, even as the odds are stacked against you; of the struggle to become who you are and not who everyone expects you to be; and of the desperate realities of poor and working-class black families.
Review:
I read The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas a long time ago now and immediately fell in love with her writing style and the stories that she was giving a voice to. There’s just something so wonderfully unique and authentic about her storytelling that pulls you in, and so I wasn’t surprised, when I found myself so easily slipping into Bri’s life in On The Come Up. I don’t know how she does it, but these characters just felt so fleshed out and had a vitality about them, that you can’t help but become engrossed in the story, they seem so real, that your emotional response to everything they go through is inexplicably heightened. Their lives just seem so believable, that you literally feel like a fly on the wall as they go about their day to day lives, but trust me, by no means did it seem boring or run of the mill. The characters could be doing the most mundane things, but the author always finds a way to make them interesting, like adding little back stories and such. I just always feel so at home and comfortable in her stories, because they always just seem to have this spark about them, especially when it comes to family relationships.
Angie Thomas, without a doubt, writes some of the best family relationships, the dynamics are always so interesting every time, with each member of the family having their own clear personality and role at large. I think that a lot of people, myself included, won’t ever truly get to know what life is like for people, especially children, that live in the ‘hood’, and so stories like this are truly their only window into that life. And to me anyway, Thomas does an incredible job of showing off the wonderful things in life, even if you live in these areas, but also offers an honest, and often unpleasant look at the negatives of this environment. And I love that she shows that your environment doesn’t always reflect you, yes Bri lives in a neighbourhood that has its issues, with an even worse one just around the corner, but she has a beautiful family who care for one another deeply. Granted, Bri lets those around her get the better of her sometimes, but it was mostly because she was desperate not to spend her life living in that area and was looking for a way out. But luckily for her, she had multiple people that cared about her enough to intervene, which a lot of people in her situation don’t, her aunt being the perfect example of this. I just felt that it was important to show how easily one can be led astray, especially when people have such low expectations of you anyway. I’m going on a bit, but I really do love the emphasis on family in this book.
Now onto how Thomas acknowledges the realistic problems that a child from the ‘hood’ can go through, but sheds positive light on it. She humanises the stories we see on the news, as we see how it can literally take one incident to make someone’s life spiral out of control, but it doesn’t have to be the end. For example when Bri’s dad died, her mum’s grief led her to find solace in drugs and she became an addict, entrusting Bri and her brother to their grandparents. Bri’s Aunt Pooh (her mum’s sister) loved Bri’s dad like an older brother and his death hit her hard too, with Bri’s mum lost to drugs, she felt like she had no one and joined a gang, vowing to get revenge on the gang who killed Bri’s dad one day. Whereas Aunt Pooh is still drug dealing and part of a gang, Bri’s mum got her life on track and has been clean for 8 years. I just thought this juxtaposition was so interesting and necessary to include, by no means is Bri’s mum living a comfortable life, they have serious money problems, but she’s trying to make an honest living. And then on the other hand, Aunt Pooh is drug dealing and always has a constant flow of money. This was a perfect demonstration, as to why some in these areas fall victim to committing crimes, because they are desperate for money and they know that even if you do everything right, you still may not be able to put food on the table or keep your house warm. And then we see the same pattern of Bri’s mum and Aunt, in Bri and her brother. Trey is working to try and help out, but it’s not enough and so Bri’s desperate to do anything to make money fast to help her family, even if that means rapping about a lifestyle that’s not really hers and endangering herself in the process. But this more than anything, is what I believe leads such young kids to join gangs – they need money or simply a family of some sort.
This book was definitely very much about Bri finding herself and her place in her family and in her community at large. Bri is more than passionate about rapping and dreams of making it big, mainly because she wants a better life for her family and simply because it’s what she loves to do. But with her dad having been a famous rapper within her community before he was killed, she’s also desperate to step out of his shadow and make a name for herself. As she stumbles her way into the underground music scene, it’s not long before people are offering her things, that cost nothing but her integrity and reputation. She then makes a number of mistakes that end up costing her a lot, out of frustration at how black and brown people are treated at school and out of desperation for money. I loved Bri, I really did, but she made so many bad calls that I just wanted to shake her sometimes, though I think most of these poor decisions were made to drive the plot forward, but I did admittedly become really frustrated with her. She, like some of the other characters, made some huge progress throughout the book though, in themselves, how they viewed and communicated with each other and consequently, their lives as a whole, so I shouldn’t be too hard on her.
On The Come Up is already beautiful in the fact that it’s own voices and tells the black American experience in such an easily graspable way, that anyone can connect with. But its diversity extends past race and class, as there were two LGBT characters. Bri’s best friend Sonny was gay and her Aunt Pooh was a lesbian, I really loved that this wasn’t the main thing about their characters though, so they weren’t just a diversity token. They were both extremely well developed characters who just happened to be part of the LGBT community. This is just another one of the things that this book did right. It truly was an experience I went through with Bri and I’m glad that I got this look in to her life, as it was memorable in both its trials and triumphs. This was an exploration of self, family, society and the stereotypes that are placed on us, how we can rise above them or fall into the trap that they are. I’m so glad that Thomas is amongst the very talented crop of diverse authors in YA, as she offers stunningly rich and diverse stories that never get told in real life.
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Muse of Nyxmares 