If you have teens in your life and you haven't heard Angie Thomas's name, you haven't been paying attention. Her debut novel, The Hate U Give, is an international phenomenon: racking up 205 weeks on the New York Times Young Adult bestseller list, spawning a movie starring Amandla Stenberg (and Aotearoa's own K. Apa), a follow-up novel set in the same universe (On the Come Up), and now, a prequel to The Hate U Give, Concrete Rose.
Concrete Rose is set 17 years before The Hate U Give and focuses on the life of Maverick Carter — later to be known as Big Mav, the father of The Hate U Give's protagonist, Starr. People had long been asking about Mav's backstory, so Thomas looked hard at who this formidable character must have been when he was a teen himself.
"In The Hate U Give, we see him as this very protective father," she says. "But at 17, protection might mean, 'If I have to do what I have to do in these streets in order to take care of my family, I'm going to do that and I'm not going to worry about the consequences.'
"He's a kid who's curious about certain things: he likes literature, he likes to learn about people like Malcolm X. He hasn't fully absorbed it yet but he's starting to peek into that. But at 17, he's still a knuckle-headed teenager whose life is turned upside down by fatherhood."
Authenticity to Maverick's voice was a driving force for Thomas from the get-go and part of that meant writing both dialogue and narration with the influence of AAVE (African American Vernacular English). "I had to put aside my doubt that people wouldn't get it – because the fact is that if people don't understand something, they will find it out. And context makes such a huge difference, so I had to trust my readers a bit more. As an author, I think that's something a lot of us have to remind ourselves of constantly."