Storyline:

Tony Johnson was very well written on and about.  You clearly get a feeling from him early on in the book and very quickly either love him or hate him.  What is unique about this, is that even if you choose to hate him, you care about him.  He is memorable.

There is no pretentious in this book.  There is no “this must have been researched” moments either.  As you read the book, you notice that it is written by someone who has had all those thoughts in their head.  From someone who didn’t walk around asking others how they felt and then wrote about it, but from someone who understood those feelings and wrote about them perfectly.

This was good.  What surprised me about this book, is that I got a version before the final corrected book came out.  I knew that going in.  However the author went page by page and manually corrected the mistakes.  He didn’t have to do that.  He could have simply said it was an uncorrected copy and left the mistakes.  I was incredibly impressed by this and wish other authors would do the same.

I liked this book a lot.  In my opinion it should be read by high school students across the country, to give them a better appreciation of others around them and help dispel pre-conceived notions.

Product Description

Tony Johnson is a studious young man planning to soon graduate from much more than high school. Although his zip code places him in a Bronx tenement pre “rise of Obama”, his sights are set far beyond the trappings of his humble upbringing. Collegiate dreams and falling in love with a white classmate put him strongly at odds with his father. Although his brother C.J. s rebellious ways endanger his life on gang ruled streets, and the virginal innocence of their sister Tanya is clearly approaching its demise, it is Tony who incurs the majority of Lionel Johnson’s wrath for the sins of ambition, daring to be with Janet Mitchell, and refusing to bend to his father’s will. Seeing unrealized goals reincarnated in the eyes of his eldest son harshly remind Lionel of what once could have been, and of what went wrong. His own childhood in a segregated southern town established a bitter, prejudiced outlook that is the only legacy he has to pass down to his children. When his job and role as primary breadwinner are lost, Lionel’s authority quickly erodes and he drowns his disappointment one drink at a time. This affords Tony, who lacks the seemingly servile patience of his mother, an opportunity to assert his right to become the man he wants to be rather than allowing his fate to be set by chance and circumstance. But throughout the course of Roy Pickering’s engrossing debut novel, Tony comes to learn that the world is not as black and white as he and his father’s opposing mindsets would suggest.