Concrete Rose

About Concrete Rose

Concrete Rose is a young adult novel by Angie Thomas, published in 2021 by Balzer & Bray. It is a prequel to The Hate U Give, set seventeen years earlier in the same fictional Garden Heights neighborhood. The protagonist is Maverick Carter — the father whom readers of the first novel know as a steady, loving presence in Starr's life. Concrete Rose takes Maverick at seventeen, before he became that man, and shows the decisions that shaped him.

When Maverick learns that his girlfriend Lisa is pregnant, his world shifts. He is already navigating the pressure of the King Lords — the gang that claimed his father, who is now in prison — and working at a grocery store to help his family make ends meet. The novel asks what it costs a Black teenager in a disinvested neighborhood to choose a different path when every structure around him makes that choice harder. Thomas does not answer that question simplistically. Maverick makes mistakes. He is loyal in ways that hurt him. He grows slowly, incompletely, over the course of a year that changes everything.

The book received a Printz Honor and has been widely taught alongside The Hate U Give as a companion text that deepens the world Thomas has built.

Black Boyhood and the Weight of Legacy

One of the central tensions in Concrete Rose is the way Maverick is pulled between two inherited identities. His father was a King Lord. His community respects the gang as a form of protection and power. At the same time, his uncle is a barber who offers him another model of manhood — one grounded in community, craft, and presence. Between these two poles, Maverick has to define what it means to be a man for his son without the guidance of a father who is locked away.

Thomas brings the same specificity to Garden Heights here that made The Hate U Give resonate — the dialect, the block dynamics, the particular way poverty and community coexist in Black neighborhoods that are rarely depicted as whole places in mainstream fiction. Concrete Rose extends that world back in time and makes Maverick fully human: not a supporting character's backstory but a young man with his own fears, humor, and love.

Challenges and Banning

Like The Hate U Give, Concrete Rose has been challenged in school districts where community members object to its language, depictions of gang activity, and portrayal of teen pregnancy and drug dealing. Some challenges have framed the book's honest depiction of Black life in a marginalized neighborhood as inappropriate or politically motivated. The book has been removed from several school libraries as part of broader sweeps targeting Angie Thomas's work.

Educators who teach both books together argue that reading Maverick as a teenager makes his parenting of Starr in The Hate U Give more legible and more emotionally resonant — and that depicting the humanity of characters navigating structural poverty is not a political act but a literary one.