Review: Concrete Rose

Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been almost four years since Angie Thomas gave us The Hate U Give and, as far as I can remember, it hasn't been off the bestseller list once since then. Did I ever expect at the time that she would give us a prequel centered on Starr's dad Maverick? I admit, no, and when she announced this book, its premise was pretty unexpected. But yeah, here we are, getting to see Maverick as a younger man, about the same age Starr was in her book - so, back in 1998. 

In a lot of ways, this book is pretty different from either of its two Garden Heights predecessors (for which there are plenty of call-forwards to both, as well to Nic Stone's work - at one point there's a brief cameo by Justyce McCallister's mom). Most notably, this book doesn't center on issues of police brutality or misogyny and homophobia, but it's still as unapologetically Black as any of Thomas's works to date, and centers on Maverick's struggles between his peers and their gang connections (especially his own, his father being a notorious King Lord), as well as his family - an ever growing family, as Iesha has given birth to a son and found out that Mav, thanks to a one-night stand when he and his true love Lisa were on the rocks, is the father. So she basically pawns the child off on Mav and his mom. But thanks to Mav's mom being equal parts tough and loving, he himself toughens up over time as he takes on this immense responsibility, raising little Seven. As the book goes on, though, Mav makes a lot of pivotal decisions - some of which only raise bigger and bigger complications. And, in some cases, pit him at greater odds with Lisa and her family, especially her brother Carlos. Let's just say Mav's disdain for Carlos in THUG is pretty clearly deeper than mere contempt for his career choice as a cop. 

If this book has any flaw, it's that it tends toward occasional aimlessness, but that's also tempered by the fact that it's a shorter book than Thomas's previous 400-page plus stories - if she'd written this one to a similar length, it would've probably come off a little too thin of plot. Also, despite it being a prequel, there is still plenty of room for surprises in the narrative, little details we wouldn't have seen coming from reading Thomas's first two books. And of course there's a lot of little moments where, even at half the age we know him at in THUG, there are little flashes of Mav's unique flavor of dad joke - like how he likens the Montagues and Capulets to rival gangs, similarly to the jokes he would later crack about the rivalries between Hogwarts houses. 

My guess is that this might be the last we get in Garden Heights for a while, since Thomas says she's going to shift into fantasy on her next book. But maybe someday we'll be back, so I'm not quite sure we'll be saying ave atque vale to this world yet - certainly not when it's also part of a shared universe with Nic Stone and Becky Albertalli's works at least.

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