Concrete Rose, Angie Thomas, author, Dion Graham, narrator
This is a heartbreaking novel. Young men who are forced to prove themselves because of their prevailing culture, often instead, sell themselves short and fail at life. Reputation and image are all-important, with life hardly valued and vengeance and pride overtaking common sense. Teenagers are too promiscuous, so that children are having children before they are old enough to rear them responsibly. Single parent households with absentee fathers are common with many incarcerated and not merely missing.
Maverick Carter was just one week into his seventeenth year when he found out that his one-night stand with Aisha had made him the father of a three month old baby boy. Aisha calls him King for the man she hoped would be the father, but it was not to be. Maverick was only at the beginning of his sixteenth year when he made that baby. The mother, also a teenager, was ill-equipped to handle being a mother, and was emotionally and physically overwhelmed. She and her mom abandoned the child to Maverick’s care as soon as the test results were given. His mom, unlike Aisha’s, was more responsible and compassionate. She would not abandon the child or exile her son. She would help him and guide him, but she demanded that he be responsible for making this baby. He renamed the baby Seven because it means perfection.
Maverick has a girlfriend, also a high school student, who leaves him when she finds out about his unfaithfulness and his son. Soon, however, circumstances throw them together and Maverick makes another baby with Lisa. Now, just 17, he is about to become the father of two children. He is not able to support his mother, let alone two children from different mothers. Lisa comes from a better and more educated background. Her family is devastated and her mother casts her out. Lisa had dreamed of college, and had wanted Maverick to go to college too. He was not a good student, but she encouraged him, before they broke up. Now her life was on the rocks, too. These teens made poor choices and assumed little responsibility for the reasons for those choices.
Maverick misses having a role model to turn to for advice. His cousin, like a brother to him, has been murdered, like so many others in his neighborhood. His father, Adonis, is known as a gang leader, a reputation Maverick is forced to uphold. His father is in prison. Maverick skates on the edge of criminality as he is involved with selling drugs. Although he vows to be there to help his mother, children and girlfriends, he knows he can get caught. He has a neighbor who influences him to go straight and he vows to change.
Violence, drugs and promiscuity are a destructive way of life. One by one, girls get pregnant, boys are murdered, others go to jail, and still, the gang culture of criminality and brutality continues. Poverty is deep rooted and no matter how hard they try, they don’t seem to get ahead. They seem to write their own epitaphs with their lack of proper upbringing and intact families. Neighbors and relatives all seem to try to help out, but often, it is to no avail, as the moral values of the young are not as strong as those who are in an older generation.
A lack of sexual responsibility seems to permeate the community with young girls, basically babies themselves, giving birth to babies they do not know how to care for, and young men, completely unaware of the responsibility of fatherhood or of what constitutes statutory rape, continue to behave recklessly! Making babies seems to be their national pastime, with few realizing the major consequences of the act. Overwhelmed by responsibility, their lives are changed forever. Still, they seem to love their children, in spite of everything.
There is a code requiring avenging every hostile act, great and small, against anyone in their group or family, so that they are not thought of as weak. The fact that education, which could enrich their lives and propel them into a future of financial security is often scoffed at, or is totally not feasible, and is not valued much by the younger generation who feel they are doomed from the start, by society, does not help the situation. I was left with the feeling that immaturity, poor values, poor family structure, poor morals, and a complete lack of responsibility for ones actions, by those who were guilty and unable to accept their own behavior as the fault, were the actual root causes of the poverty and lawlessness. The characters blamed others or outside circumstances for their poor behavior, never their own poor choices. They made the same mistakes over and over again. It seems like such a waste of human capital. The prevailing cancel culture is alive and well, also, as Maverick condemns Jefferson Davis who had slaves, and rejects his high school’s name, instead calling it Garden Heights like the name of the community. He also complains that white people didn’t discover America, since it was already here and didn’t need to be discovered. While the story seems to be about teenagers who break the rules, are insecure, have few ambitions and are all poor. They view college as inaccessible or as a place to party, not learn, and so condemn themselves to failure. Inappropriate sexual behavior by children causes an epidemic of children bearing children. And this pattern of pregnancy and child bearing ruins the future of this community.
The title of the book is taken from a poem by Tupac Shakur who succumbed to the violent culture he lived in, even though his philanthropy should have shaped more of his life than his criminal behavior. He wrote a poem called, “The Rose that Grew from Concrete”. It is from that poem that Angie Thomas’ birthed her title. The lines “Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? / Proving nature’s laws wrong it learned how to walk without having feet.” inspired her. Defying all odds, could beauty grow out of an ugly environment? Can a leopard change its spots? Can a man bent on criminal behavior become an upstanding citizen? Will society even allow that to happen? I sure hope so, because the problems faced by those in this book seemed almost insurmountable.