The Odyssey Dragons
Concrete Rose Book Talk
Odyssey Middle School Team (Elena, Iseaja, Lola, Luka, Nora)
Concrete Rose follows Maverick as a teenager trying to be a better father in a system set up against him.
Why did this book stick with me? (Two members read the book for the first time months ago, and have reread it multiple times or kept thinking about it.)
During the past year we have learned about the injustices in the world. I think this is the main reason why this book is so compelling to me because it brings up the points of the injustices and shows it in a way I don’t think about. The characters also create such a compelling story and you want to know what will happen to them because you care about them so much. The plot also starts with a compelling problem that needs to be solved and you just want to know what will happen and what will be the solution to that problem. This book relates to what is happening in the real world so that sticks to me a lot. It is an important subject to talk about, such as racism and what happens outside of what I’m used to. I can picture what is going on so the imagery is really key in the book.
Why did this book grab me? (One member read this book faster than he reads other books.)
This book was so unlike anything I’ve ever read, even though that might be my fault it really showed me another side of reading, because I usually only read fantasy-fiction, this book really gave me perspective as to what many people experience in the real world with each other. The characters are so vivid; you can see how much they’re trying just to build lives for themselves, and how hard it is for them to do this.
Why does Concrete Rose deserve to win the award even though Angie Thomas won it previously?
This isn’t really a series book, because Angie Thomas does such complicated things with the characters we think we know from The Hate U Give. With Maverick, for instance, we can see the way in which he gets caught up as a teenager, and is stuck, with no good choices (a bad choice and a worse choice). You can see him growing up when he finds out someone he thought he could trust did something terrible, and she shows him deciding to start thinking for other people (his baby Seven and his baby Starr) instead of himself. Seven turns out to be the reason why Maverick is better, which we didn’t see coming for most of the book.
And King, who is just a bad character in The Hate U Give, is interesting in this book. While he becomes a bad guy in this book, you can see him as similar to Maverick in lots of ways. He is in the same situation as Maverick, but he makes different decisions. He’s not just evil, but he does something bad because he thought it was the only way, only choice. The way he’s raised, the way his life works, we can see how Maverick could have become King. We see the way that single choices can really have such big impacts down the line. We see Maverick grow, but in ways that are believable. Thomas shows us that even though all these bad things are happening, it’s not totally insurmountable. After Maverick’s cousin Dre is killed, Maverick goes back to selling drugs—there are layers and complexity to the book. We see Maverick struggle to control his anger.
This book is so relatable. I don’t know this world (says one white member of the group), but she describes it so well. It’s changed how I think and act, my assumptions about what people do and why. I can see the way all of these systems are set up against black people. The Hate U Give was mostly focused just on police violence, but Concrete Rose shows the ways in which many systems (let’s name some!) are set up against black people. And it does so with emotion. (What does this mean?)
Trevor Noah talks about the “black tax”, where for so long black people have been pulled back, and it means that younger generations have to start not at zero but at a negative, and they work to support themselves and their families. They have to struggle so much just to get back to zero. This book really shows what that looks like, because it shows how characters from The Hate U Give are struggling against so many odds and working so hard to make life better for their children.
Even though the book is about such a heavy topic, it manages to have humor in believable ways. It lifts you up right before it brings you down. Two characters joke with each other about their weird tastes in food shortly before one of them is shot.
Our group read three different books, and this was our consensus top choice.