The Word on Street Lit: Silhouettes, Flavor Flav & Ice-T

A pair of memoirs—don’t think of them as street lit per se—are highlighted below. Yet both authors grew up living a street-lit life filled with crime, hip-hop music, sex, familial dysfunction, and more. Ice-T on the West Coast and Flavor Flav on the East Coast flourished in the early years of the hip-hop industry and now are instantly recognizable celebrities. Their lives are characterized by twists, setbacks, and redemption, and their stories will grab the attention of street-lit fans.

Back to street lit proper: the pseudonymous Silhouettes takes readers to the front lines in an urban school as a teenager struggles to find his identity. The yanked-from-the-headlines theme of a male student having sex with a female teacher and the authentic narrative voice make Street Soldier my pick of the month.

Pick of the Month

Silhouettes. Street Soldier. Urban Bks. Jun. 2011. 288p. ISBN 9781601624529. pap. $14.95. F
Jamal “Prince” Perkins is a 17-year-old football star struggling with the daily grind in his St. Louis hood. His father isn't around, his mother’s boyfriend beats her, his partner is in jail, and at least four girls tell him they’re pregnant from his seed. Angry? Oh, yeah. In fact, Prince is mad as hell. Defiant, with “Street Soldier” tattooed on his chest, this young man knows the score about surviving. “A boy’s best friend wasn’t his dog around here; rather, it was a 9 mm strapped to his side.” School means nothing to him until he realizes his algebra teacher, Ms. Macklin, who makes pantsuits look sexy, is throwing him some game. Upgrading from teenage girls, Prince is now all about sleeping with his 26-year-old teacher. The fun and games turn deadly when young Prince learns lessons about sex versus love.
VERDICT Silhouettes (a pseudonym for a tag team of anonymous authors) sprinkles raw sex scenes throughout a realistic coming-of-age story that reads almost like a YA novel, but brace yourself for a shocking revelation in the last 20 pages. More please!

Ashley & Jaquavis. Murderville: First of a Trilogy. Cash Money Content, dist. by Atria: S. & S. Jul. 2011. 256p. ISBN 9781936399000. pap. $14.95. F
Caught in the horrors of a Sierra Leone war zone, 12-year-old A’Shai and ten-year-old Liberty believe they’ve found an escape via a ship sprayed-painted “Murderville.” Instead, human traffickers have sent them to Mexico, where Liberty is forced into child prostitution while A’shai labors harvesting cocoa leaves to be turned into cocaine. The rags-to-riches theme continues when A’shai is rescued by a Detroit drug lord and Liberty becomes a high-priced call girl. After eight years, the lovers reconnect at an exclusive party in Los Angeles called the Gentleman’s Ball. There, an Egyptian drug dealer buys Liberty’s services for $500,000. A’shai is determined to rescue her, but this requires him to betray those he loves.
VERDICT This tale starts off as a ho-hum coming-of-age novel about kids surviving against all odds. Fortunately, the prolific authors (The Cartel 3: The Last Chapter) establish their stride after 75 pages, as the body count rises with the violence. Ashley and Jaquavis are hugely popular; buy in anticipation of demand.

Banks, Kendall. One Night Stand. Life Changing Bks. 256p. 2011. ISBN 9781934230268. pap. $15. F
A summary of Banks’s (Rich Girls) plot written as a personal ad would read like this: “Single female psycho stalker seeks married male nympho.” Zaria Hopkins, cruising in a club and dressed to kill, meets the married Gerald Hardy. This playa lives to sex up dozens of women and charms Zaria into doing the nasty in his Chevy Tahoe. Now she’s in love, but our boy is moving on to his next conquest. Ah, but the voices in Zaria’s head tell her to get revenge by any means possible, including kidnapping and murder. Zaria is a scary, conniving witch who gets what she wants by using a knife and a gun. Yep, as Gerald discovers, “this broad is straight cuckoo for Coco Puffs.”
VERDICT This fast-moving novel loads up surprises, leaving breathless readers say, “Whoa, that’s cold.” The cliff-hanging ending promises a sequel, Another…One Night Stand, due out in August. Buy multiples.

Woods, Teri. Dutch III: International Gangster. Grand Central. 240p. ISBN 9780446551540. pap. $14.99. F
Following Dutch II: Angel’s Revenge (reviewed here), Woods winds up her successful trilogy. Dutch is on trial for Newark’s Month of Murder, but with the help of Craze (who’s his half-brother), he busts out of the courtoom. Following a bloody shoot-out, Dutch, Craze, and the Charlies (his loyal women gangsters) settle in Paris, France. There, a mysterious Mr. Odouwo contracts them to assassinate the president of Nigeria. Why? To gain control over lucrative diamond mines, with a payoff of a quarter of a billion dollars! That’s big bucks for guys from Newark’s mean streets. Nothing comes clean with that kind of money, and Dutch needs more than his hood partner and Charlies to watch his back.
VERDICT Plenty of videogame-type violence peppers this fast-moving novel, which may remind readers of the movie Ocean’s Eleven. The author’s name always moves product, and this action story of gangsters taking their robbery talents to a world stage won’t disappoint her many fans.

Recalling the Street Life

Flavor Flav. Flavor Flav: The Icon; The Memoir. Farrah Gray: HCI Bks. 244p. photogs. ISBN 9780982702772. $24.95. AUTOBIOG
What can you say about someone who was present at hip-hop’s inception, plunged into extreme drug use, and reinvented himself as a reality TV star? William Jonathan Drayton, aka Flavor Flav, has done it all. Crime? He first hot-wired and stole a car at age nine. Sex? Flavor has seven children with several different women. He claims he lost his virginity at age six or seven (he doesn’t recall details). Drugs? The rapper estimates he was smoking $2800 of crack daily during the 1990s. Labeling himself an icon, Flavor Flav opened with Chuck D as frontmen for the rap group Public Enemy. My gosh, has it been 25 years since the group hit the charts with "Public Enemy #1"? Because he has trouble recalling exact dates, readers will question Flavor’s reliability. Still, who knew Brigitte Nielsen is such a freak?
VERDICT Flavor Flav’s rambling style reads like an oral testament but will attract street-lit readers. In his words, “I’d done drugs, run numbers, and been to jail. I wasn’t perpetrating a street style. I was the street.” Purchase where hip-hop draws well. [Farrah Gray Publishing is a new imprint of HCI Books.—Ed.]

Ice-T & Douglas Century. Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption—From South Central to Hollywood. One World: Ballantine. 2011. 243p. photogs. ISBN 9780345523280. $25. AUTOBIOG
We have known him for the past 11 years as Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola on Law & Order: SVU, but how did the man born Tracy Marrow morph from gangster Trey to rapper/actor Ice-T? Holding nothing back, he answers here in fascinating detail. Although he stole jewelry, furs, and Rolex watches, the young Ice-T shunned drugs and alcohol because, as he rationalizes, “In the hood, the sober man has the most power.” Orphaned at age 11 and growing up in the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles, he enlisted into the army for money to help raise his daughter. Looking back on his career as an established actor, Ice-T states, “Hollywood is way more gangster than the streets. Hollywood is way colder. Way more vicious.” Listed at the end of the book are 50 lessons from Ice-T’s Daily Game of Life; No. 11: “It’s not hard to convince the streets you’re a gangster. It’s hard to convince the feds you’re not.”
VERDICT This well-written memoir has a rags-to-riches vibe and manages to ring true and avoid preachy platitudes. Although sprinkled with rough language, this work would be a good fit for inner-city school reading lists. A definite must-have for urban public library systems. [This title was also reviewed in the 1/11 issue of Library Journal.—Ed.]