Review: Dear Justyce

Dear Justyce by Nic Stone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was something of a surprise that Nic Stone came out with this sequel/prequel/spinoff to Dear Martin, but she acknowledges right off the bat that it came about out of necessity. While Justyce's story was an all-important one, a searing glimpse into the life of a young Black man whose intelligence doesn't protect him from a racist system, Stone also got a lot of reader responses wondering, what about Black boys who don't come from Justyce's position of relative privilege? And so we get the story of Quan Banks, who knew Justyce when they were much younger boys, but wound up on a different track in life - no fancy private school, but a broken family (including an awful stepdad who, in his ten-year-old mind, became a real-life Count Olaf as he found his escape in A Series of Unfortunate Events) and unjust incarceration. Thus, not unlike Justyce writing letters to MLK, Quan writes letters to Justyce, hoping to get some much needed help. Luckily, Justyce has some good knowledge he's picked up in his first year at Yale (in stark contrast with his old schoolmate Jared, who's just as obnoxiously white-privileged as ever, to the point of bragging about not getting arrested for marijuana possession in Connecticut when Justyce would've most likely done hard time in the same situation.) As with the first book, Stone writes this one in a similar experimental style, incorporating bursts of heavily line-broken verse and even screenplay and interview-type formats, in addition to the letters interspersed between chapters. It's the first time I've seen her revisit one of her old storytelling formats, but then again, she's proven herself such a powerful and prolific storytelling stylist that it's only to her benefit as always.

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