The Tomorrow Game
Rival Teenagers, Their Race for a Gun, and a Community United to Save Them
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times bestselling author’s gripping account of a Chicago community coming together to save a group of teenagers from gun violence.
In the tradition of works like Random Family and Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Sudhir Venkatesh’s The Tomorrow Game is a deeply reported chronicle of families surviving in a Southside Chicago community.
At the heart of the story are two teenagers: Marshall Mariot, an introverted video gamer and bike rider, and Frankie Paul, who leaves foster care to direct his cousin’s drug business while he’s in prison. Frankie devises a plan to attack Marshall and his friends—it is his best chance to showcase his toughness and win respect for his crew. Catching wind of the plan, Marshall and his friends decide they must preemptively go after Frankie’s crew to defend their honor. The pressure mounts as both groups of teens race to find a gun and strike first. All the while, the community at large—a cast that includes the teens’ families, black market gun dealers, local pastors, a bodega owner, and a veteran beat cop—try their best to defuse the conflict and keep the kids alive.
Based on Venkatesh’s three decades of immersion in Chicago’s Southside, and as propulsive as a novel, The Tomorrow Game is a nuanced, timely look at the toll that poverty and gun violence take on families and their communities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An inexperienced teenager takes over his older cousin's drug business and lands in hot water in this fast-paced if somewhat shopworn look at the roots of Chicago's gun violence. Ethnographer Venkatesh (Floating City) explains how 17-year-old Frankie Paul immediately faced insubordination, supplier issues, and threats from competitors after his cousin Willie went to prison for gun trafficking. When a group of kids brazenly robbed the novice dealers Frankie hired to replace his cousin's veteran crew, he tried to restore his street cred by coming down hard on Marshall Mariot, an "ordinary" kid he regularly bullied at school. But Marshall decided to fight back and got his friends together to help him buy a gun, setting the stage for a showdown that various community members tried to prevent. Venkatesh has impressive access to this drama, which unfolds over the course of a few weeks, but he imbues the narrative with a morality tale's sensibility and renders the key players involved—including a street-smart preacher, an evenhanded cop, and a good-hearted gun runner—more as stock characters than real people. Still, this is a dramatic and accessible deconstruction of the social conditions that give rise to criminal behavior.
