A Literary Friendship Through the Demands of Success
New York Times bestselling authors Angie Thomas and Nic Stone discuss Thomas’s third book,“Concrete Rose.”
On December 9, 2015 — at 5:57 p.m. — I made a decision that would change my life: I slid into the DMs of a woman named Angela C. Thomas. I’d heard about this woman from a writer friend who thought she and I would get along based on something we had in common: We’d both written young adult novels that dealt with police brutality and had recently sold them to publishers.
As it turned out, we also had other similarities. We both grew up in the American South — I in Atlanta, Georgia, and she in Jackson, Mississippi; both have evangelical backgrounds (and were grappling with churches’ responses to the murders of unarmed Black people and the Black Lives Matter movement); and both are obsessed with Harry Potter. That we were also both rabble-rousers with big mouths was mere icing on a delightful play-sisterhood cake.
With my sis’s third novel, Concrete Rose, the rabble-rousing kicks up a notch. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. Because my favorite thing about Thomas is her willingness to go there — to utilize narrative as a means of holding a magnifying glass up over “controversial” things so readers can see a bit more than what’s on the…
