I adored Angie Thomas’s debut, The Hate U Give. I recommended it to nearly every person I encountered in the last year and have never been disappointed by their reactions. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Thomas’s second book was an option in my Book of the Month Club membership.
On The Come Up follows Bri, a sixteen year-old girl living in the Garden Heights neighborhood that is familiar to readers of The Hate U Give. The action takes place about a year following the events of that book, in a neighborhood still recovering from the murder of an unarmed teenager by a police officer. Bri has dreams of becoming a successful rapper and using her music to bring her family out of poverty. Though the setting is similar, the characters of the two books have very different lives. Starr Carter, the protagonist of The Hate U Give, had a comfortable home and two parents who clearly adored her. Bri’s reality is quite different, as her father was murdered by gang members when she was a child and her mother abandoned Bri and her brother at their grandparents’ home when she turned to drugs to cope with her grief. Bri and her mother have since been reunited but the family is constantly struggling to keep food in the house, shoes on their feet and the electricity on.
While navigating school, crushes, and her musical ambition, Bri also has to navigate the realities of life in Garden Heights. Bri is assaulted by school security guards who assume she is selling drugs (rather than the candy she sells to students to make extra money). She becomes notorious in her town after she releases a rap talking about her anger and frustration at being profiled by the guards. This also inadvertently involves her in the gang activity of Garden Heights when her words are misconstrued.
On the Come Up continues the themes so well handled in The Hate U Give: the reality of institutionalized racism and the casual blindness of those who are not affected by it; that the right thing and the easy thing are often at odds; the bond of family can overcome a lot. Bri is a less relatable character (at least to me) than Starr, but I loved this book.