How Are You Going to Save Yourself LOWER GRADE his best friend

his best friend

is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy

past and present

plant yourself

and handed over her grandmother’s gold jewelry

How Are You Going to Save Yourself LOWER GRADE his best friendFour young men struggle to liberate themselves from the burden of being black and male in America in an assured debut "as up to the minute as a Kendrick Lamar track and as ruefully steeped in eternal truths as a Gogol tale" (Kirkus, starred review). Bound together by shared experience but pulled apart by their changing fortunes, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, struggle to liberate themselves