In Queens, an unnamed eleven-year-old who lives with her mother spends most of her time with her best friend on the block, Neeka, who is one of many children. Their friendship opens to include D, who appears in their lives one day and stays for two years; D is a foster kid with the freedom to roam the city during the day. The three jump rope and find meaning in Tupac's lyrics, and ponder the (in)justice system, which has locked up Neeka's flamboyant older brother, Tash. The narrator goes with Neeka's family to visit Tash in prison upstate, and they all celebrate together when he is released, and when her other older brother, JayJones, is accepted to college.

An intimate slice-of-life story. See also: Double Dutch by Sharon Draper

Quotes

The summer before D Foster's real mama came and took her away, Tupac wasn't dead yet. (first sentence)

"He [Albert Einstein] wasn't saying nothing we didn't already know. He just had a way of saying it that made people feel confused and when peeps get confused, they have to figure out what to do. So they made him a genius. If you're a genius, it just means you confused some people somewhere." (unnamed narrator, 36)

I read all those books...because I was trying to see some tiny bit of myself up in those books. And even though I didn't ever find it, I kept on looking. (37)

Lately, I'd been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together - make myself into one whole person like everybody else. (37) ( )

After reading this, I went and listened to Tupac music for the rest of the day. I really got it, the connection these characters feel with that music, and I got it in a way that I never did from years of music education classes. From a teacher perspective, this is a brilliant argument for hip hop in the schools.

From a reading perspective, I loved the close female friendship as the core of the novel, the connection that D had with the narrator that was always acknowledged but unspoken, and the pacing. I also was deeply affected by the prison scene.

Woodson writes just so well. She deserves the acclaim she's gotten, and I'm looking forward to reading more of her works. ( )

Jacqueline Woodson captures the essence of being 12 going on 13, confined to your block in Queens, protected by mothers who know how quickly life can go wrong. And then a new girl arrives and everything seems to change. Woodson weaves the story around the larger story of the shooting of Tupac Shakur as well as his prison sentence. ( )

The day D Foster enters Neeka and her best friend’s lives, the world opens up for them. Suddenly they’re keenly aware of things beyond their block in Queens, things that are happening in the world—like the shooting of Tupac Shakur—and in search of their Big Purpose in life. When—all too soon—D’s mom swoops in to reclaim her, and Tupac dies, they are left with a sense of how quickly things can change and how even all-too-brief connections can touch deeply.

1994 was a huge year for me. I was fifteen and, looking back, I feel like that was the year I broke free from my cocoon of childhood. Music played a large part. I had two older brothers. We watched a lot of MTV. I distinctly remember the moments that stirred my emotions on several occasions that year: seeing for the first time Nas's “The World Is Yours,” Ahmad's “Back in the Day,” and Wu-Tang Clan's “C.R.E.A.M.” '94 was also the year I began to take notice of 2Pac. 2Pac's music hadn't hit me hard all of a sudden like the others; however, by the following year, no other rapper compared.

I expected to find some of the nostalgia of those years in Jacqueline Woodson's After Tupac and D Foster. Here's a novel set during that period, a young adult novel that uses Tupac Shakur as a central image. I expected something from this novel—something very poetic and edgy, something contemporary, something like the feeling of emergence, something familiar—but what I got instead was something else entirely.

If this novel reminded me of anything, it was of that time prior to emergence. It reminded me of playing with friends on the school playground, running around the neighborhood, and of my elementary school library. It reminded me of Judy Blue. Not the nostalgia of Yo! MTV Raps, Fresh, or even Skee-Lo. No—Judy-freakin-Blume. Now on the surface, this may seem like a poor comparison. Any time Blume is mentioned, my first thought has always gone to the hilarious Fudge. But Blume wasn't always so humorous. Ignore that hilarity from Blume for a moment and what do you have? Socially conscious fiction. Subjects considered taboo for children. And at its core, a tale of friendship. All things you find in After Tupac and D Foster.

Now, I haven't read a lot of Blume. And this is the first work I've read from Woodson. So I wondered if the comparison was way off. I turned to Google: Woodson cites Blume as a major influence; Blume and Woodson were both born on February 12 (astrology everyone!); Blume is actually Woodson's mother (okay, I made that one up). Maybe not enough to convince the masses, but I'm sticking by it.

So with the Blume comparison in mind, I’m a little shook by this Young Adult label. With its largely simple plot, its focus on friendship and skipping rope, this novel brings to mind the books a ten or eleven year old would read. But I guess this label probably has to do more with content. After Tupac... may be a little too edgy for your average school librarian. Still, despite my opinion that this book is rather juvenile, it does have a little bit of depth to it and is certainly not an entirely light read.

As a fan of Shakur, I turned to this book hoping to find something I'd left in my teenage years. It's not in here. Frankly, I feel the Shakur connection to the novel is weak. It adds a few parallels for the story of D Foster, but largely I think it detracts from the novel. The characters try to convince me that they are passionate about Shakur and his life, but their dialogue around him feels more like a Wikipedia entry, not someone closely following his status. Then it hit me: Woodson, born in 1963, an author from a generation before Tupac, is writing to a generation that came after. Perhaps the stilted references to Shakur were a lack of generational understanding on the author’s part (though I don’t think this is entirely true of Woodson), or they could’ve been an attempt to speak to a generation that wouldn’t relate to the passion. For someone who was especially shaped by those years, such as myself, the sentiment is misplaced.

Still, I liked this book and I think it has so much to do with that earlier nostalgia, that of reading Judy Blume for the first time. It's refreshing to see that a new author has been handed the torch and is carrying on the legacy. Who would I recommend this book to? That’s a tricky one. The content, the maturity, the scope, the literary merit—they’re all over the place and point to different audiences. Looking at everything, I think After Tupac and D Foster can appeal to readers in several groups, but would probably be most appreciated by those very mature readers in upper elementary or middle school. And if Judy Blume herself hasn't read this book yet, I think she should. ( )