"Tyrell" by Coe Booth

Tyrell is a fifteen-year-old black lad living in New York with his ten-year-old brother and his moms; his father is in prison and the family, homeless, have been sent to a cockroach infested motel with other homeless families. He earns money using NY Metro season tickets which he uses to swipe commuters through the station gates in return for a dollar. He is an intriguing mix of toxic masculinity (aggression and a 24-7 sex drive; "Guys gotta act stronger and tougher when females is watching them." C 13) and 'new man' protection: if he has to kill someone to protect his girl, he reflects, he will just have to go to jail. He wants to earn enough money to get his family into an apartment; the only way he can do this quasi-legally is by setting up a rap party using his pop's DJ equipment. This is a 'lets do the show right here' story set in a context of squalor, homelessness, petty crime and hunger.

He has a great and seemingly authentic voice, there is a lot of verisimilitude and there is a great plot with some fine characters. It has been perfectly st up for a sequel; I suspect there will be a series.

A lot of the book is focussed on food. Tyrell never talks about his hunger but he chronicles every meal, from the one at the church where he has to sit through a two-hour service first to the ten dollar breakfast at McDonalds (two egg-McMuffin meals) and all the times he is invited to share someone's food and wolfs it down:

• "Troy keep eating and eating like someone gonna take the food away if he don’t eat everything in, like, five minutes." (C 7)
• "I’m eating so fast, I ain’t even picking my head up in between bites." (C 7)
• "I ain’t thinking ‘bout no cigarette. I don’t want nothing to spoil the taste of that food in my mouth." (C 8)
• "And what’s messed up is that I’m really hungry too. Starving. I need this food." (C 27)

There are moments when the hopelessness of homelessness is perfectly captured:

• "I gotta do something. I wanna go somewhere, but I don’t got nowhere to go." (C 4)

But Tyrell also rages against the impotence of people like his mother who refuse to take responsibility for picking themselves up off the floor:

• "Everyone on this bus got some excuse for why they here. None of it is they fault." (C 3)
• "I’m tired of the way she act, like everyone s’posed to do everything for her all the time. Even if she don’t do nothing. Even when my pops was home, she never did nothing for herself. She just sat ‘round expecting him to do everything for her and buy her things. No matter how he got them." (C 4)

Other great moments:

• "I never really believed in God ‘cause I knew if there was a God he wouldn’t never take my pops away from me. And my pops always taught me not to depend on nobody but myself." (C 8)
• "I leave that store with a little over a dollar. Damn, I need to make some money soon." (C 8)
• "Here we ain’t got no kitchen table to sit at, so we gotta work on the bed, which really don’t cut it." (C 9)
• "That ain’t who I am. Shit, my pops ain’t raise me to be no pussy." (C 11)
• "That woman was on me like white on rice, let me tell you." (C 11)
• "I never used to hate snow, but when you ain’t got no warm coat or boots, snow ain’t cool. Not only that, but I ain’t got no other sneakers to put on, so I’ma be stuck in these all fuckin’ day." (C 13)
• "If my brother can have some fun while we in this situation, I’ma let him. He don’t deserve to be at Bennett. He should be outside with a good coat and boots playing in the snow, so why I’ma stop him from having a good time?" (C 13)
• "Life is so fucked up for Troy right now. Someone need to let him win sometime." (C 13)
• "Just ‘cause she hooked up with a lot of guys don’t mean she wasn’t being used by them." (C 16)
• "Females don’t know how hard it is sleeping with them when you ain’t doing nothing. Shit ain’t right. My whole body was hurting to get with her." (C 17)
• "Teachers took one look at me and started putting me in programs for at-risk kids, then at-risk boys, then at-risk teenagers. Personally, I ain’t never knew what the fuck I was s’posed to be at risk of, except growing up Black" (C 17)
• "Cal has a pops so bad, he make my pops look like one of them TV fathers." (C 19)
• "Last time they let him out, you shoulda seen him, walking around in clothes from, like, fifteen years ago, trying to pick up young girls with his old-ass self.” (C 19)
• "Cal a happy drunk, but I’m like one of them sorry-ass drunks you see crying on theyself on the train." (C 19)
• "My opinion, weed ain’t nothing compared to alcohol. They made the wrong thing legal." (C 21)
• "My school wasn’t nothing like this. It was more like a prison, you ask me. We had to go through metal detectors just to get in, and if them alarms went off, we had to go to another room to get searched again with one of them hand wands like they use at the airport. And no matter what you had on you, they would say it was a weapon and take it away from you, even when you was bringing it for school. Shit like compasses for geometry and them little staplers wasn’t allowed in my school. Even rulers. Like we was gonna file them down and make knives outta them or something. The whole thing never made no sense to me. They was s’posed to be getting us ready for college, not a life behind bars." (C 23)
• "Damn. She giving me handouts. I mean, I know she being nice and everything, but all I feel is embarrassed." (C 27)
• "I don’t know why, but females always think they know what guys need. Like we too dumb to run our own life or something." (C 28)
• "And the truth is, when you pay nothin’, you get nothin’." (C 29)
• “I need your father,” she say, and she look kinda lost too. “I can’t do it by myself no more. I need him.” (C 31)

A super young adult book from the other side of the tracks.

Also read: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

August 2020