On the Come Up

About On the Come Up

On the Come Up is a young adult novel by Angie Thomas, published in 2019 by Balzer & Bray. It is Thomas's second novel, following the phenomenon of The Hate U Give, and it occupies the same fictional world of Garden Heights. The protagonist is Brianna Jackson — Bri — a sixteen-year-old who grew up in the shadow of her father, Lawless, a rapper who was killed before he crossed over from the underground scene into mainstream success. Bri has inherited his talent, his hunger, and his story. She wants to be the greatest rapper who ever lived. She is sixteen and her family is facing eviction.

The novel follows Bri's attempt to break into the local hip-hop scene while managing the friction between her artistic instincts and what the industry wants from her. When a battle rap she records goes viral for the wrong reasons — a verse about police violence gets her labeled a threat by media and school officials who don't understand what she was trying to say — Bri has to decide whether to compromise her voice to survive or double down and risk everything.

On the Come Up debuted at number one on the New York Times YA bestseller list and received seven starred reviews from major publications. It was a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor Book.

Hip-Hop, Voice, and Economic Survival

Hip-hop is not background texture in this novel — it is the medium through which Thomas explores what it means to speak truthfully when the systems around you do not want to hear it. Bri's raps are reproduced in full in the text, and they read as genuine lyrics, not literary approximations. The craft of the verse reflects Thomas's engagement with the tradition she is drawing on.

The economic pressures on Bri's family are as central to the novel as the music. Her mother, a recovering addict, works for a church. The threat of losing their home is constant and real. Thomas connects hip-hop's origins in economic deprivation to Bri's present circumstances: the music is not just art, it is survival strategy, community language, and the one space where someone with nothing still has power.

Why the Book Has Been Challenged

On the Come Up has been challenged and removed from schools primarily for its language — including profanity used in the context of street dialect and rap lyrics — and for its depictions of drug use, poverty, and racially charged conflict with authority figures including police and school security. Some challengers have characterized the book as anti-law-enforcement or racially divisive.

Thomas has addressed these challenges directly in public statements, arguing that the experiences her books depict are the lived reality of many of her readers — and that calling accurate depictions of Black poverty and police violence "inappropriate" for school is itself a form of erasure. The book has appeared on the ALA's most challenged books lists and continues to be widely assigned and widely contested.