This is an amazing and remarkable book. It’s engaging and incredibly well written. I felt quickly invested in Starr’s life and journey and found myself sad when the story ended.

The novel is the journey of Starr, a sixteen-year-old who witnesses the death of two childhood friends: one at the hands of a cop; one at the hands of a drive-by shooter. It’s not a new story. In fact, we’ve seen and heard all of it before. And, yet, Thomas captures something in both the uniqueness of experience and the mundane-ness of the experience. It’s that we have heard the story and perhaps not lived it that makes this storytelling so important. Because, we not only read the story, but are given an opportunity to live it. Very well done.

From a writing perspective, this is now among my favorite First Person/Present Tense novels.

Highly recommend.