Nelson offers a novella about a resilient young man navigating adolescence and young adulthood in a tough city neighborhood.

At age 9, Pierre Muhammad moves to Quindaro, or “the ‘Q,’” a financially struggling and often violent part of Kansas City, Missouri. He learns to box in order to survive, but when he’s just 12, a group of older men ambush him and give him a beating. His good friend Ben, along with Ben’s brothers, take a form of retribution called a “dig”: They take Pierre’s assailants, beaten and bound, to a remote section of Quindaro Park and bury them with only their heads sticking up out of the ground, and leave them there for days: “The dig was going to mess them up permanently,” narrates Pierre. Aside from this act, and despite pervasive violence, unemployment, and poverty in the area where he lives, he decides not to turn to crime. He takes his hardworking mother’s emphasis on structure and education to heart and does well in school; he later attends Penn Valley Community College, followed by the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where he graduates with an engineering degree. While employed in his field, saving money, and looking forward to a better life, he saves two very young girls, Darlene and Dionne, from an impending assault; the incident goes on to change all their lives. Over the course of this wide-ranging novella, Nelson presents readers with a brief, briskly paced story that is gritty, violent, funny, and tender, by turns. Its descriptions of violence and retribution are frequently graphic. However, the sometimes-bawdy humor interspersed throughout the narrative lightens the tone: “We were so poor that if I hadn’t been born a male, I wouldn’t have had anything to play with.” At its heart, however, this is a story about hanging tough, taking full advantage of opportunities that are available, and creating and supporting a family.

A harsh but engaging story of overcoming obstacles.