First Semester

Overview

Cecil R. Cross II's First Semester follows James "JD" Dawson, a young man who leaves a rough upbringing on one coast behind for a fresh start at the University of Atlanta. The move is meant to be a clean break, a chance to become someone other than the person his old neighborhood expected him to be.

Instead, JD spends his early weeks on campus falling into familiar patterns: new friends who are more interested in a good time than a good GPA, classes skipped, assignments ignored, and an eye constantly wandering toward the women around him. When his grades catch up with him, the university assigns him a tutor, Katrina Turner, whose patience and intelligence make the work in front of him suddenly feel worth doing.

What begins as an academic rescue mission becomes something more personal, as JD realizes that impressing Katrina will take more than charm. The novel tracks his halting, often comic attempts to mature, framing his romantic interest as inseparable from the larger question of whether he can actually grow into the life he came to college to build.

A Campus Coming-of-Age Story

First Semester belongs to a tradition of African American campus fiction that uses the freshman year as a crucible, testing a young protagonist's identity against new freedoms, new temptations, and new expectations. JD's arc is less about the mechanics of college itself than about the gap between who he has been and who he wants to become, with Katrina serving as both a catalyst and a mirror for that transformation.

The book's energy comes from its frank, conversational voice and its willingness to let JD stumble before he learns anything. Rather than presenting a tidy redemption narrative, Cross lingers on the distractions and bad decisions that make growth believable, trusting readers to find the humor and the stakes in equal measure. That approach has made the novel resonate with readers drawn to stories of young Black men navigating higher education, romance, and self-reinvention away from the neighborhoods that shaped them.

Why First Semester Has Been Challenged

The chapters depicting JD's social life on campus—his pursuit of female classmates, the party culture surrounding his dorm, and the increasingly frank nature of his relationship with Katrina—are the material most often flagged by readers and reviewers. Because the novel treats JD's romantic and sexual curiosity as a central, often comic engine of the plot rather than a cautionary subplot, some have argued it normalizes behavior they consider inappropriate for the shelves where it has been placed, particularly for younger readers who might pick it up expecting a straightforward college story.

Underlying these objections is a broader discomfort with the book's casual treatment of sex and immaturity as ordinary features of early adulthood rather than problems requiring explicit moral commentary. Critics of the book's inclusion in certain collections have pointed to specific scenes as too explicit for the intended audience, while defenders counter that the novel's candor is part of what makes its portrait of a young man's uneven maturation feel honest. This catalog tracks the title as challenged in one state and one school district.