Tyrell by Coe Booth
“She don’t want me ending up like my pops. In jail. Again”
(Booth, 5).
This quote is the last quote at the end of chapter one and
it sums up everything that I know to be true about this book so far. Novesha is
Tyrell’s girlfriend and I already know she is someone who he looks up to and
someone who motivates and pushes him to continue to succeed in life—despite his
hardships. Tyrell is a book written about the life of a teen who comes from a
troubled background—his father has been in and out of prison most of his life
and his mother seems to be on drugs most of the time. Tyrell is forced to
choose from a life of doing what he has to do to in order to make sure that his
family survives or just doing what is right. I believe that this quote is very
powerful for a number of reasons—not doing do I think it has a great deal to do
with the book, but in life, most of my students can relate to this, growing up
in a single parent household who does their best, a parent who is incarcerated,
or a parent who struggles to do what is right. Tyrell shows that he too
struggles because of the background that be comes from—he grows up in the Bronx
in a neighborhood that isn’t the best for him and isn’t conducive to him being
successful. Novesha, his girlfriend is who Booth juxtaposes his life with—someone
who still lives in a less desirable area, but still grows up a household where
she is well taken care of and values education. I believe that this is Booth’s
way of trying to show the readers that life in an area that they may know to be
true for them does not always have to look a certain way—we can grow up poor
and will always be forced to make choices for ourselves that will affect the
outcomes of our lives—for Tyrell the choice he is faced with at the end of the
novel is whether or not he will stay out of trouble like Novesha tells him, or
if he will commit a crime and end up in jail like his father. The choice is
simple, yet the implications of those choices are very difficult for him to
foresee and handle.
