Agent (for Zoboi and Salaam): Ammi-Joan Paquette, Erin Murphy Literary. 1) is a verse novel about 16-year-old Amal, a Black boy and passionate artist who ends up in juvenile detention following an altercation with White boys. Photo illustration by Kirkus Punching the Air (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, Sept. criminal justice system through the eyes of a wrongly convicted Black boy (“shaping me into/ the monster/ they wanted me to be”). Ibi Zoboi, left, photo by Joseph Zoboi Yusef Salaam, photo by Staci Nurse/Staci Marie Studio. Zoboi and Salaam deliver an unfiltered perspective of the anti-Blackness upholding the U.S.
From the trial onward, the authors liken the pervasive imprisonment of Black bodies to the history of chattel slavery in America (“and this door leads to a slave ship/ and maybe jail”), and describe how educational racism feeds Black students into the school-to-prison pipeline (“I failed the class/ she failed me”).
Using free verse, Zoboi and Salaam experiment with style, structure, and repetition to portray “old soul” Amal’s struggle to hold on to his humanity through the chaotic, often dehumanizing experience of juvenile incarceration. Amal, a gifted artist and poet attending a prestigious fine arts high school, has his life turned upside down when a nighttime park confrontation leaves a white kid from the other side “of that invisible line/ we weren’t supposed to cross” in a coma, and Amal and his four friends on the hook for assault and battery they did not commit. Zoboi ( Pride) and Salaam (one of the Exonerated Five) together craft a powerful indictment of institutional racism and mass incarceration through the imagined experience of Amal, a Black, Muslim 16-year-old facing imprisonment.
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