Tyrell Reviews

TYRELL has been reviewed just about everywhere!

Check 'em out:

(Scroll down or click on the links!)

The New York Times

VOYA

Publishers Weekly

Booklist

School Library Journal

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Late in Coe Booth’s fast-paced first novel, “Tyrell,” the hero and narrator draws a distinction between himself — he’s homeless — and the other homeless people he encounters at a Spanish-speaking church in the Bronx. “They the nasty kinda homeless, not like my family,” he says. “ ’Cause we been holding it together.” The struggle to keep up appearances is at the heart of many young adult novels, but it takes on a different urgency when it includes finding regular meals and keeping a roof over one’s head.
Booth’s homegrown account of a hard-luck adolescence in the Bronx does not pull punches. Tyrell is a 15-year-old high school dropout whose main ambition in life is to hold on to his girlfriend, Novisha, who has her sights set on college. When his mother gets evicted, on a snowy winter day, and the city can’t find a decent shelter for her and Tyrell and his younger brother, Troy, he finds himself in the roach-infested Bennett Motel. For the next week he will attempt to bootstrap his family back into normalcy, taking on the role of his father, who’s in prison.

Booth wisely presents Tyrell’s story as a quest to get out of Bennett: he has a series of challenges to overcome, and he learns something about himself with each victory. He is equipped with a good set of tools from the start — his dark wit and emotional honesty recall the heroes of Sharon Flake and Walter Dean Myers. (He appreciates the hot meal Novisha’s mother serves whenever he visits, but it comes at a price: “Ms. Jenkins is just talking on and on ’bout how me and my family need to stay close and keep our faith in God strong while we going through hard times. I nod every couple minutes so she think I’m really listening, but to be honest, I’m really tired of everyone saying that. Like they know what we going through.”)

The obstacles are many, starting with Tyrell’s family. His mother is both incompetent and neglectful, which makes her immediately stand out from the saintly and long-suffering mothers in similar books. At one point she suggests that if Tyrell sold drugs the family would be better off, and she puts Troy in special education to ensure a government check every month.
Still, family is family, and Tyrell plans to free his from Bennett by doing the one thing that his father did well: giving parties. As a D.J., Tyrell’s dad could earn thousands of dollars in a single night, so Tyrell begins to tap his old man’s friends, a colorful collection of bouncers and pimps, to plan a bash in an abandoned bus depot.

To bring it off, Tyrell has to round up equipment and promote the event, and through this process we meet his peers, a set of would-be hustlers and layabouts, including a teenage father-to-be who talks enthusiastically about his girlfriend’s baby as if he were a PlayStation. With their help, Tyrell sets up the party, and in the interactions between him and his friends Booth does a wonderful job of laying out the informal support system that keeps homeless kids like him clothed and fed. Handouts from a teacher, groceries from a suitor for Tyrell’s mother, and loans and small gifts keep Tyrell’s head above water; by the end of the book these look less like desperate measures and more like an older way of life, before government checks and A.T.M.’s.

While the observations are keen and the twists are engaging (a betrayal! a stalker! a secret diary!), it is Tyrell’s relationship with his father that forms the soul of this touching, surprising book. Those expecting a cathartic reunion are advised to look elsewhere: Tyrell’s father remains a remote presence, and most of his advice is awful and ignorant. When Tyrell recalls how his father taught him that beating a woman is sometimes necessary, we hope desperately that he has developed the independence and moral sense to disagree. The story rises and falls on his decision, and the others that mark his journey to manhood in this gritty and gripping first novel. — Ned Vizzini

VOYA
Tyrell Green inherits the literary turf previously walked upon by Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield-adolescence as seen through the eyes of a young male. But Tom and Holden would not last a day in Tyrell's tough, inner-city world. Forced to relocate with a mentally challenged younger brother and his maternally challenged mother, or "my moms" as he refers to her, to a roach-infested shelter, he struggles between his love for virginal Novisha and his sexual attraction for sultry Jasmine. All the while, he makes his way through a world rife with gangs, drugs, and little prospect for a future of any kind, save for the money he might rake in by throwing a huge party in an empty building. Mastery of Tyrell's voice and dialect is the book's greatest accomplishment. Readers are fully immersed in his world, a transition so seamless that the reader never notices before he or she is surrounded. In a lesser author's hands, Tyrell's speech patterns would be distracting, but with Booth it is a natural fit. This tiny epic is a glimpse at a place many readers will never visit, and others will never leave. Everything is captured and held up to the light, not for judgment but to show readers that life like Tyrell's actually happens. Booth's undertaking is a monumental one, and let the record show that she provides the definitive tale of the modern African American urban youth.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (Starred Review)
In her first novel, set in a Brooklyn ghetto, Booth conveys the frustration of a teenager who is trying to lead a better life despite all the pressures to do otherwise. Narrator 15-year-old Tyrell is in love with Novisha ("that's the only thing I got going for me right now") and dreams of the two living together. However Tyrell faces some major challenges. With his father in jail for the third time, Tyrell is homeless. He's living temporarily at the roach-infested Bennett Motel ("got rats the size of cats and shit"), sharing a room with his mother and little brother, Troy. He needs a way to make some money, but he wants to be sure it's legal: "I get locked up, Troy gonna end up back in the system." Using his father's DJ equipment, Tyrell forms a plan that could bring in a good chunk of money and get them back in an apartment. Using the voice of an inner-city teen, Booth keeps the story focused on Tyrell and his ups and downs as he struggles to do the right thing, and keeps the plot developments realistic-especially Tyrell's relief after his brother is taken by the Administration for Children's Services, allowing him the opportunity of freedom ("Back home to the projects. Where I belong"). Tyrell's frank talk about sex may be offensive for some readers, but only adds to his character's credibility

BOOKLIST (Starred Review)
“You don’t hardly get to have no kinda childhood in the hood.” At 15, Tyrell, is trying to keep his little brother in school and safe in their roach-infested shelter in the Bronx. He’s dropped out of school, and Moms wants him to sell weed to make money. But Tyrell is too smart. He doesn’t want to end up in prison like his dad, so he tries to organize a neighborhood party to raise money. His girlfriend, Novisha, isn’t happy that Tyrell has dropped out. She loves him, and they make out, but he respects her wish to remain a virgin. Booth, who was born and raised in the Bronx, is now a social worker there, and her first novel is heartbreakingly realistic. There are some plot contrivances––including Tyrell’s stumbling upon Novisha’s diary––but the immediate first-person narrative is pitch-perfect: fast, funny, and anguished (There’s also lots of use of the n-word, though the term is employed in the colloquial sense, not as an insult). Unlike many books reflecting the contemporary street scene, this one is more than just a pat situation with a glib resolution; it’s filled with surprising twists and turns that continue to the end. ––Hazel Rochman

SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL (Starred Review)
Now that his father is in jail, nothing seems to be going right for 15-year-old Tyrell. His mother’s refusal to work and her stint with welfare fraud have forced them into homelessness and life in a roach-infested shelter in Hunts Point. At the shelter, Tyrell soon realizes that his attraction to another resident, Jasmine, could derail his dreams of a future with his girl, Novisha. Torn between the needs of the women in his life and his seven-year-old brother, Tyrell is determined to stay clean as he agonizes over creating a new life for his family. Booth combines the rhythm of raw street lingo with the harsh realities of an inner-city urban life to illuminate the labyrinth of Tyrell’s world. As he struggles to escape this circle of poverty, he must also battle dual temptations of sexual frustration and the easy money he could make as a drug dealer. This is a thrilling, fast-paced novel whose strong plot and array of vivid, well-developed characters take readers on an unforgettable journey through the gritty streets of New York City’s South Bronx. At its heart is the painful choice the teen must make as he realizes the effect of his mother’s failure to do right by their family.–Caryl Soriano

HORN BOOK (Starred Review)
Fifteen-year-old Tyrell has a lot on his plate in this kitchen-sink drama of African-American life in the hardscrabble Bronx: his father is in jail; he, his little brother Troy, and their feckless mother are parked in a sordid motel for the homeless in Hunts Point; and bad-girl Jasmine is tempting him away from good-girl Novisha ("She don't even let me put my hand in her panties or nothing. But she do like blowing me"). It all might be a bit much for one novel, Booth's first, but the author so convincingly grounds her story in Tyrell's tough-talking but vulnerable voice that we are won over to his side. Despite the grim setting evoked by the sensory prose, this isn't a story of street violence and drugs; rather, it concerns the more intimate deprivations (and moments of connection, like Tyrell's play in the snow with little Troy) of living poor. What plot there is comes from Tyrell's effort to put together an underground dance party to raise much-needed cash, and while this is successful in some small measure, the real happy ending comes when Tyrell gets to move back into the projects, "where I belong," a conclusion readers should greet with both relief and unease.

KLIATT
Tyrell lives in a homeless shelter in the Bronx with his mother and his younger brother. His father is in jail, and 15-year-old Tyrell knows he doesn't want to end up there himself, but dangerous temptations abound. His girlfriend Novisha expects a lot from him, and a new girl he meets, Jasmine, wants more than just friendship. Meanwhile, Tyrell just wants to make enough money to get his family into an apartment, and so he comes up with a plan to hold a secret dance party and charge admission, with Tyrell as the D.J. Booth, a Bronx teacher and social worker, clearly knows the world of her inner-city characters; the novel feels absolutely real. The language reflects that (e.g., "that nigga can talk some mad shit when he get started"), and sex, drugs, and violence are here, too. Inner-city teens and those curious about that world will find it memorably depicted here.

KIRKUS
After his DJ father is incarcerated for drug dealing, 15-year-old Tyrell, his brother and his mother are rendered homeless and move to a slummy city shelter in the Bronx. His mom’s ineffectual attempts at keeping the family afloat financially and emotionally soon fall flat, and Tyrell is forced to take the family’s situation into his own hands. Inspired by his father, he decides to throw a secret dance party in an abandoned bus garage with a steep admission charge guaranteed to boost his family’s income. Booth, a writing consultant for the NYC Housing Authority, clearly understands how teens living on the edge—in shelters, in projects, on the street—live, talk and survive. It’s the slick street language of these tough but lovable characters and her gritty landscapes that will capture the interests of urban fiction fans. While the complex party-planning plotline doesn’t exactly cut a straight path, its convoluted-ness undoubtedly illustrates the kinds of obstacles these teens must overcome and the connections they need to make in order to survive—inside or outside the law.

DENVER POST
Son of a drug-dealing jailbird father and an aggressively irresponsible mother, 15-year-old Tyrell finds schooling secondary to looking out for his 7-year-old brother and himself as his family bounces between New York's housing projects and homeless shelters.
His mother won't work, so Tyrell earns what his best friend calls "chump change" by using his MetroCard to "swipe in" subway passengers paying a black market price.

Tyrell hews to his own skewed values, refusing to deal drugs "and make some real money" with his friend Cal, but also to be sexually active with his 14-year-old girlfriend and another girl at the shelter.

The language is as raw as Tyrell's life. Coe presents the sex and drugs scene as a given for kids in the projects and shelters. Few other current novels so profoundly illustrate how mercilessly existing conditions ensure that poor remain poor.

A good ending, from Tyrell's viewpoint, is getting to go back to the projects from the tawdry shelter. This is a powerful, unforgiving and important illustration of an increasing population of U.S. residents who are hungry, homeless and deliberately ignored by their government and compatriots.