High school senior Justyce McAllister is feeling the heat of being an African American man in 2017. The news is full of stories of unarmed black men being shot by white cops. He’s arrested by a police officer for just walking down the street, when all he was doing was trying to keep his drunk ex-girlfriend from getting behind the wheel of her car. He gets dragged into a frustrating racial argument in his Societal Evolution class with classmates who believe in “colorblindness.” Disgruntled students at his exclusive private school suggest that the only reason Justyce got into Yale was to “fill a quota.” On top of all that, he’s also fighting a strong attraction to his debate partner Sarah Jane, who is smart, funny….and white. Life is becoming beyond complicated, so Justyce seeks out the wisdom of the one person he thinks might understand what he’s going through: Martin Luther King. In a series of poignant letters to Dr. King, Justyce tries to understand why “things aren’t as equal as folks say they are” and how he can keep moving forward when it seems like the whole system is bent on pushing him back. The writing helps, a little. But when Justyce’s world explodes at the end of a gun, his belief in MLK’s philosophy is shattered. Will he answer violence with violence or will he find the strength to rise above and be like Martin? Nic Stone’s debut novel reads like a timely fictional primer of the issues surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, galvanized by the frank and authentic dialogues that take place between Justyce, his friends and teachers like Dr. Dray, who teaches Societal Evolution. The topical, provocative discussions that take place in Dr. Dray’s class immediately took me back to the heated arguments that reverberated in Ms. Lemry’s Contemporary American Thought class in Chris Crutcher‘s YA classic Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
. Like Crutcher before her, Nic Stone is writing about the issues a new generation of teens care about in a raw voice that is undeniably true. You won’t be able to look away. Coming to a library, bookstore or e-reader near you October 2017.
