For years, she has spent her weekdays at a private, majority-white school, where she explains, “I’m cool by default because I’m one of the only black kids there.” Back at home, she lives with her father “Big Mav,” a former gang-member who wants to make their crime-ridden neighborhood a better place, and her mother Lisa, who wants to move away in order to keep her family safe. The incident also means that the carefully built-up boundary between Starr’s two worlds begins to crumble. By the time she’s 16, Starr Carter, the protagonist of the book, has lost two of her childhood friends to gun violence: one by a gang drive-by, and one by a cop.Īs the sole witness to her friend Khalil’s fatal shooting by a police officer, Starr is overwhelmed by the pressure of testifying before a grand jury and the responsibility of speaking out in Khalil’s memory. The last words of Eric Garner, adopted and amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, echo again in the early pages of Angie Thomas’s young-adult novel The Hate U Give. My job is to tell them otherwise.”Ĭoncrete Rose will be published by HarperCollins on January 12, 2021.“They finally put a sheet over Khalil. “They’re being made to feel as if their stories shouldn’t be told. Thomas addressed the issue of censorship in the February 2020 issue of ELLE, telling writer Roxanne Fequiere, "It’s frustrating, because you’re basically telling young people, ‘If this book is about you, your life makes me uncomfortable,’” she said. My concern is for those young people who need this. Why? Because there are young people who need this story…our discomfort is not my problem.
I am going to say it, I think it will be banned more so than The Hate U Give was…And I’m going to keep writing it and my publisher is still going to publish it.
But he’s amongst us every single day and it’s something that we cannot ignore. Thomas told People she expects her new novel to be banned even more than The Hate U Give: "This is a book about a 17-year-old young man who just found out he’s a father…Nobody wants to talk about teen sex, nobody wants to talk about teen pregnancy or teen parents. Other topics Thomas hopes to delve into further in Concrete Rose including police brutality, racism, and teen pregnancy. They have stories and they deserve the opportunity to not just grow, they deserve the opportunities to be seen as someone beyond their circumstances." Young men who are trying to still find their way and are often written off and seen as troublemakers or this or that," she said, "They’re never seen as potential, they’re only seen as being at risk. “And what was fascinating to me was once readers started reading The Hate U Give and then when the film came out, he was the character that I was asked about the most.” She elaborated further on the real-life inspiration that led her to continue Maverick's story: "I started talking to young real-life Mavericks. “Of all characters who really just stayed with me, Maverick was at the top of that list,” Thomas told the outlet.
The author spoke to People about how the novel will follow Maverick's story, including becoming a father at age 17 to Starr's older brother, Seven.
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