Sixteen year old Rashad Butler is a good student, an artist, and a member of JrROTC (his father's orders). Rashad stops at a corner store to pick up chips and suddenly finds himself accused of a crime and brutally beaten by a police officer. Quinn Collins is a fellow student and a star basketball player who witnesses the beating by the officer who has been his mentor since the death of Quinn's father in Afghanistan. While Rashad recovers in the hospital the high school and the town start to take up sides mostly along racial lines. Quinn is directly impacted as the basketball team divides into factions between Rashad's friends and the friends of the officer's younger brother. Quinn is caught in the middle having witnessed the beating but having the close connection to the cop involved. There is clearly more than two sides to the story and those involved begin to realize that. The section where the students read aloud from Ellison's Invisible Man was serendipitous since we just finished the summer read of that book. This novel is one of the selections we are reading in the Great Stories Grant book club. It is a hard hitting story that I had to read in sections then step away from because of the subject matter and its resemblance to events in Ferguson in 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment