Tysha

young-minded hustler
New York City libraries have lots of "Urban Fiction" (it has its own section) so I thought I'd see what it was like. I just grabbed this one at random. It's kinda how you might expect from the title a blurb - a story of drug dealers and their family. Prison, police, corruption. The code of the streets. Drug dealing, double-crossing. The plot was a fairly standard soap-opera-ish, crime series type affair (with twins, as a hook for this particular one). There are a lot of female characters, including the lead - an urban mother with teen sons, which I'm guessing may be, roughly, the dominant demographic of the intended audience. To me, it felt like a crime-themed romance novel.

There's quite a moral ambiguity here - many of the drug dealers are depicted as essentially good. The police, and other public employees, are also mostly good, hard-working and are even sympathetic to the "good" criminals. The good guys and bad guys are very clearly delineated, just not along lines of legality.

In fact, that's one of the most jarring things about the novel - the protagonists, even if doing bad things, are sympathetically portrayed, with good motives; the villains only have bad characteristics and the very basest of motives. And these are often overly explained, sometimes in slightly stilted dialogue. That got a bit much at times.

One interesting thing was that the author put references to her and her books, and also her sons and their music careers into the books. They didn't actually appear, but characters referred to them. It was kinda amusing.

There was a bit of poor editing toward the end of the book - one set of events was described in contradictory ways; there was some weird repetition. Looming deadline? Not a big deal.

I'm not drawing too many conclusions from this one book, and doubt I'll be exploring much further. Still - interesting.
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