Her ache for stardom is clear the effects of the past and the burden that Bri carries to lift up her family (and her neighborhood, too) that is later revealed only serves to intensify this struggle in a way that speaks to the reader. Even without context in the beginning, Thomas makes Bri’s dream of stardom, her desire to be tangible and identifiable through Bri’s honest, witty commentary, despite the fact that a reader like myself shared little in common with her. Daydreaming about the future instead, Bri is anxiously awaiting a call inviting her to her first freestyle battle at the Ring-the crucial initiation that makes a Garden resident a true rapper. The story opens up on Bri, a seemingly normal teenage girl who has bad grades to the dismay of her mother, who longs for her confiscated phone, and who is currently bored out her mind sitting through her after-school ACT prep class. At the root of these events is the death of Bri’s father, a local rap legend and rising, who was murdered in front of the family home by a rival gang, a trauma that still reverberates in the present setting of the novel. Trey, her loyal and erudite older brother who seemingly broke the cycle and graduated college, is stuck back home making pizzas for a living to support the family. Her mother, Jay, a former drug addict, can’t afford to pay for private school, so Midtown was the second-best option.
Bri, the star of On the Come Up is a high-schooler at Midtown School of the Arts, drily noting the “diversity initiative” that allowed her to bus in. The book shares a setting-and the ever-lurking shadow of racial tensions and discrimination in background-with Thomas’ debut novel: Garden Heights, a neighborhood notoriously poor, black, and gunshot-haunted, a bad reputation that the reader is challenged to consider. Back with her second novel after The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas hits the ground running with On the Come Up, a funny, hopeful, and deeply impactful story of a young rapper fighting through poverty, trauma, and controversy to realize her dream.
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