4.5 ~ This book made me cry on public transportation.
I didn't expect it to be this difficult to read but I'm glad it was.

What's this book about?:
When the "security control" in Moss' school gets out of hand and violence follows, he, with the help of his friends, his ma and his comunity, get together to start protesting.

And damn did it punch me in the gut...
Not only was it greatly important to find a book focused on the expression of police brutality on a horrific level, we also got some brilliant diversity on so many levels : gender (inc. trans & non binary), sexuality (inc. gay, bi, ace, demi, lesbian), race (mostly african-american and latinx), religion (christian, muslim) and even disability (wheelchair user!)...
They literally call themselves a queer family.

Moss, as a character, is very well written.
He's a young black gay kid still figuring things out. He loves his mama, is going through a tough relationship with his best friend, is starting to date a cute guy, and has panic attacks regularly.
The portrayal of his anxiety was amazingly written in my opinion. I felt his sruggle and simply wanted to believe that if I closed the book and didn't read it for a couple of days, he and his friends would be okay. Of course that's not how it is. We don't get to pause life's struggles. We need to face them. Realise that some struggles have the right to cause us anger, and that our anger can be put to good use.

As this is the author's first book, I still think some technical elements aren't perfect. But it didn't matter that much. The goal was to tell a story, a story which so many people have to go through, and one which not many people understand fully until they've experienced it themselves.

The last two lines of this book are the biggest punch and they are so damn important.

I'll put the last couple of paragraphs in spoiler brackets even though it doesn't spoil the story. You can decide whether you want to to read them or not:

Spoiler

"What sould the Oakland olice Department do next?"
Next? Moss thought. [...]
"Stop killing us."
Then Moss walked away from it all.