Sixteen-year-old Tariq Johnson is shot twice on his own block by Jack Franklin, a white man who claims self-defense — and is released. Magoon builds the novel out of many first-person voices that never agree: Tariq's best friend Tyrell, who was there; Jennica, who held Tariq and performed CPR; his mother and grandmother; gang members of the Kings; a running-for-office minister; the shooter himself. Was Tariq carrying a gun, or a Snickers bar? Had he joined the Kings, or refused them? The novel assembles a neighborhood's competing truths around one boy's death and declines to settle them for the reader. It was named a Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book.
Author: Kekla Magoon · Original publisher: Henry Holt and Company (New York), 2014
