I received this gorgeous covered book by Harper 360 and I was super excited to read it, I also wanted to start reading more books by Black authors and Own Voices, and helping out more, so I also purchased the Audio version, so this will be a review for both!

Set in Brooklyn 1998 we follow 3 friends, Quadir, Jarrell and Jasmine.

The book starts at the funeral of Quadir and Jarrell's best friend Steph, Jasmine is Steph's little sister, who was murdered.

Jasmine takes herself off into Steph's bedroom for a moment to herself, and is soon followed by the 2 boys, they then find Steph's stash of tapes of his own music under his bed, and notebooks of lyrics.

The 3 kids are so in awe of how brilliant Steph's music is, that they decide that the whole world needs to hear it, but how do they get it heard, especially when the artist himself is dead and they themselves are only teenagers?

Well being in Brooklyn, the Rap scene was the place to be, and while managing to get CD's printed and a few well connected people to listen, they manage to get Steph's music noticed, and by changing his name to "The Architect" they didn't have to mention that Steph isn't around anymore.

But what happens when a big time record producer want to meet the Artist? And how were the kids to know that some of the lyrics could cause a lot of trouble for everyone?


The narration for this book was by a full cast and it was fabulous, the lyrics are Rapped and very poignant for the late 90's and also today.

I enjoyed this book from beginning to end, grab it if you can