I was raised knowing that when hip-hop spoke up, it was always challenged. So when I was dealing with my own censorship, I thought of the rappers who had meant so much to me, like Tupac, Biggie, Lauryn Hill and Nas, and how they went through it. I knew it wasn’t really about the language, it was the subject matter. Of course, if they paid attention to what their students were saying in the hallways they would hear many more f-bombs than I could ever write.

And it was challenged by some school districts, because of the language. The union was concerned that it created anti-police sentiments. A police union in South Carolina spoke out against the book being on a summer reading list. I got the idea for the plot after “The Hate U Give,” when I began to deal with challenges to the novel, people trying to censor it. I had this character, Bri, and I knew she had to be a rapper, but that’s all. I mean, white suburban kids are the biggest consumers of hip-hop. But for so many kids, hip-hop is their music, hip-hop is their culture, it speaks to them when other things don’t. A lot of times in Young Adult books, hip-hop is only used when the characters are at parties - otherwise they’re more into indie rock. And I could never seem to find books that gave hip-hop its due. For me, as a teenager, hip-hop was how I saw myself when I didn’t see myself in books. When did you start writing “On the Come Up”?Įven before I wrote “The Hate U Give,” I knew I wanted to write a novel that paid homage to hip-hop. These are excerpts from our conversation. I asked her to talk about how the book came into being. It’s set in the same fictional community, Garden Heights, as “The Hate U Give,” but Thomas turns her attention away from Starr (the protagonist in her first novel) to the world of hip-hop, and Brianna, a talented teenager who lives and breathes it.

Perhaps even fewer write a second novel that gets as many advance raves as Thomas’s “On the Come Up,” which will be published this month. Few first novelists have the kind of success Angie Thomas saw with “The Hate U Give,” which has spent 100 weeks on the Times Best-Seller list and been made into an equally acclaimed movie.

On the come up by angie thomas