Concrete Rose (2021) is a young adult novel by award-winning author Angie Thomas. It is the prequel to Thomas’s New York Times best-selling young adult novel The Hate U Give and explores the youth of Maverick “Mav” Carter, father of The Hate U Give’s protagonist Starr Carter. A New York Times and Indiebound best seller, Concrete Rose follows Mav as he faces the challenge of bringing up a child on his own while contending with the pressures of gang membership, masculinity, and poverty.

Plot Summary

Seventeen-year-old Maverick “Mav” Carter lives in the impoverished and predominantly Black neighborhood of Garden Heights, or “the Garden.” In many ways, he’s an average teenager. He’s funny, kind, and preoccupied with proving his manliness to his friends. He likes playing basketball, and he loves his girlfriend, Lisa. One big difference sets Mav apart from the average teenager, however: his membership in the powerful King Lords gang, an affiliation that started when he was only 12 years old. With a father who was once an influential King Lords leader and is now incarcerated, Mav needs all the protection he can get from the violence that plagues the Garden. He abides by the rules of the street, an unspoken but powerful set of guidelines that range from not getting beaten at basketball in front of a pretty girl to enacting violent revenge if someone harms a member of your family. Mav is loyal to the King Lords, but in order to support himself and his mother, he deals hard drugs with his best friend King behind the backs of the other members.

Mav’s life is upended when he finds out that he is the father of a three-month-old baby boy (later named Seven). Lisa breaks up with him, and Seven’s mother, Iesha, abandons the baby with Mav. Left to care for Seven alone, Mav must find a way to balance fatherhood with the demands of his membership in the King Lords and the need to earn enough money to support his family. At the behest of his cousin Dre, Mav quits dealing and begins working part-time for Mr. Wyatt, his next-door neighbor. His priorities start to change as he settles into fatherhood and tries to be the parent Seven deserves.

When Dre is tragically killed in a robbery, Mav struggles to navigate his grief and anger. Even though the rules of the street dictate that he must kill Dre’s suspected murderer, Ant, he ultimately decides not to go after Ant because Dre would not have wanted him to become a killer—Ant is later shot dead in an unrelated gang fight. Mav does his best to stay away from the streets, but soon discovers that his now ex-girlfriend Lisa is pregnant with his second child. Desperate to earn enough money to take care of his growing family, Mav returns to dealing with King. Fatherhood, the drug business, and the repercussions of Dre’s murder put Mav’s schoolwork on the back burner, and he flunks out of twelfth grade. As Mav’s newly-won control over his life begins to slip, he discovers that Dre’s real murderer is a local hustler named Red.

Furious and grief-stricken, Mav decides to obey the rules of the street this time and kill Red. King procures a gun for him, which he uses to ambush Red, but he finds himself unable to pull the trigger in the deciding moment.

After the failure of his revenge plan, Mav realizes that being a present father is more important to him than avenging Dre through violence. He returns the gun to King and leaves drug dealing for good to focus on his family. He accepts a full-time job with Mr. Wyatt and signs up for GED classes, working toward his goal of becoming a business owner. He also recognizes that his membership in the King Lords is holding him back from the life he wants and begins to contemplate leaving the gang. As the novel ends, Mav and Lisa are preparing to welcome their daughter.