On the Come Up

The Daughter of a Legend

Brianna (Bri) Jackson’s father Lawless was one of the greatest battle rappers in Garden Heights before he was killed. Bri has his talent and his ambition — she wants to be the greatest rapper of all time — but she is also sixteen, going to a school that treats Black students as threats, living in a neighbourhood where the opportunities are constrained, and responsible to a family and community whose expectations of her are complicated and specific.

When a song she writes goes viral — not in the way she intended, stripped of context and used to justify a narrative about violent Black youth — Bri has to navigate the gap between what she meant and what the world has decided she meant.

Hip-Hop as Subject

What On the Come Up does that its predecessor does not is take hip-hop seriously as an art form. Thomas is not using rap as backdrop but as central subject — the specific craft of bars, the competitive tradition of the cypher, the economics of mixtapes and label deals, the history of the genre and the place of legacy in it. Bri’s father is not just a dead parent but a specific presence in the culture, and her relationship to his memory is inseparable from her relationship to the music.

After The Hate U Give

On the Come Up arrived in 2019 as the most anticipated YA novel of its year, the follow-up to The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas’s 2017 debut that spent over a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a major film. The pressure on a second book after a phenomenon of that scale is enormous, and Thomas met it by returning to Garden Heights — the fictional neighbourhood she invented for her debut — but shifting the genre and the stakes. Where The Hate U Give was built around a police shooting and the activism that followed, On the Come Up is a story about art, ambition, and economic precarity, narrated by a heroine whose flaws are allowed to be genuine rather than merely sympathetic. The novel reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and confirmed that Thomas was not a one-book writer but a major voice reshaping commercial young-adult fiction around Black working-class life.

Garden Heights now functions almost as a literary world unto itself: Thomas would go on to write Concrete Rose (2021), a prequel set in the same streets, deepening the sense that she is building an interconnected body of work rather than standalone issue-novels. Bri’s family poverty — her mother newly clean from addiction, the lights cut off, the threat of going hungry — is rendered with a specificity that grounds the rap-battle plot in real consequence.

Ambition, Legacy, and the Battle Lines

What gives the book its tension is that Bri is genuinely talented and genuinely difficult. Her viral song, “On the Come Up,” is misheard as a celebration of gang violence when she meant it as armour against the stereotypes already projected onto her, and Thomas uses that misreading to dramatise something sharp and current: how a Black teenage girl’s words are seized, decontextualised, and weaponised the moment they leave her mouth. Bri’s inheritance from her father Lawless — a legendary battle rapper murdered before he made it — is both a gift and a burden, the kind of legacy that opens doors and sets an impossible standard at once. The novel’s competing pulls, between artistic ambition and loyalty to a community that has its own expectations of her, are never resolved into a neat lesson; both pulls remain real to the end. Thomas writes the hip-hop itself with the conviction of a true fan, treating the craft of bars and the ritual of the cypher as worthy of serious attention rather than backdrop, and that respect for the form is what lifts the book above the schematic territory its viral-controversy plot occasionally approaches.

Limitations

Longer and less focused than The Hate U Give. The viral controversy plot occasionally feels schematic. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

How to Read It

Readers should come to On the Come Up expecting something looser and more sprawling than its predecessor. At 473 pages it takes its time, and the rap battles, school confrontations, and family crises accumulate rather than building toward a single dramatic engine. That structure is the point: Thomas is depicting the texture of a year in a teenager’s life, with all the false starts and self-inflicted setbacks that implies. The verses Bri performs are printed in full, and readers who treat them as integral to the storytelling — reading them aloud, feeling their rhythm — will get far more from the book than those who skim past them. It works beautifully as a read-aloud or classroom text, and pairs naturally with The Hate U Give and Concrete Rose for anyone wanting to read the Garden Heights novels as a connected sequence. Above all it rewards readers willing to let Bri be wrong sometimes, to make bad choices and learn slowly, which is exactly what makes her one of the more fully human protagonists in contemporary young-adult fiction.

Who This Is For

Readers of The Hate U Give and fans of hip-hop culture who want YA fiction that takes the artform seriously.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A love letter to hip-hop and to the young women who fight for space in it. Less focused than The Hate U Give but equally committed.

Reading Guides

• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas — Full Review
• Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas — Full Review