A rose that grows in the concrete
It's the story of Starr and Khalil, former besties who didn't see each other for months now at this point and meet again at a party. After they hear gunshots they leave the party together and Starr gets ...
It's the story of Starr and Khalil, former besties who didn't see each other for months now at this point and meet again at a party. After they hear gunshots they leave the party together and Starr gets a lift in Khalil's car. During the ride they'll be pulled over by a policeman. Khalil's active part ends with the cop shooting him.
Throughout the story Starr has to deal with her grief and her anger, with the political turmoil of a black boy being killed by a white cop, with her own identity.
Up to this night Starr lives two lifes: One is with her family in a ghettoized hood in which her dad – former gangbanger an ex-con – owns a small grocery. The other part of her life takes place at a well-posed high school in a more distant district where she is along with her brother the only afro-american students among many white rich kids. Starr separates both lives from one another, she'll never introduce her white boyfriend to her dad and in school she behaves like all the others and speaks without any slang.
The dreadful night in which she watched Khalil die forces her to face up to her origins, who she is and what a person she wants to be.
Besides Khalils murder and the thus resulting racism there are many different narrative sideshows such as her boyfriend, her partly complicated family history, her friends at school on one hand and her friends in the hood on the other hand so that the book devotes to the fact of Khalil's murder but doesn't only focus Starr's story to the incident of that one night. The reader witnesses not only a developement on Starr but also on many of the other protagonists who accompany her during the course of the book.
I not only had a wonderful reading experience but also some moments in which I would've cried along the protagonists as well. I read the text in English and can recommend to everybody for the atmosphere to dulge into the wording and the slang in it's authentical original language!