Review: On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

Title: On the Come Up
Author: Angie Thomas
Publisher: Balzer & Bray
Release date: February 5th 2019
Pages: 447
Genre: Young Adult contemporary
Source: Purchased
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Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Or at least win her first battle. As the daughter of an underground hip hop legend who died right before he hit big, Bri’s got massive shoes to fill.

But it’s hard to get your come up when you’re labeled a hoodlum at school, and your fridge at home is empty after your mom loses her job. So Bri pours her anger and frustration into her first song, which goes viral…for all the wrong reasons.

Bri soon finds herself at the center of a controversy, portrayed by the media as more menace than MC. But with an eviction notice staring her family down, Bri doesn’t just want to make it—she has to. Even if it means becoming the very thing the public has made her out to be.  

The Hate U Give was a tough act to follow, but Angie Thomas does not disappoint! I'm tempted to say I loved this one even more than THUG, but... they're different books that do different things and I love them both in their own ways.

One of my favorite elements of this book was reading about Bri's emerging hip hop career. Her manager wants her to market herself as a "ratchet hood rat" because that's what he argues will sell to the prime consumers of hip hop--white kids in the suburbs who want to consume stereotypical Blackness and gang culture. Her mother and friends push back against her embracing of this part--even though her playing this "role" is not always intentional, but a misinterpretation of her speaking out against the racial profiling at her school and the sexism in the hip hop industry. This made for fascinating discussions of respectability politics, hip hop culture, the angry Black woman stereotype, media portrayals of female rappers, etc. Asides from that, the scenes of Bri performing in rap battles were super fun to read!

I also loved reading about Bri's relationship with her family and friends. I loved Bri's character, and even when she is being her most stubborn and continuously getting herself into trouble, her reasoning was completely understandable; I was just as torn as she was between her desire for success (in order to be able to help her struggling family) and her relationships with her friends and family. Her mother, brother, two best friends, and love interest were all fully developed characters, and I wanted to read more about each of their stories. 

The fact that this is set in the same neighborhood as THUG after the events of Thomas's first novel and that we get references to the events and characters in THUG is another bonus! We get to see the aftermath of the riots play out in the Garden, and we get another great discussion of racial profiling, this time through an exploration of the policing of Black and Brown students at Bri's school. This discussion, and the different Black and Brown students' perspectives on how to fight back against these forms of violence, were also really well done. All around, a super important book; I hope we get many more books set in the Garden!