“Yeah, it was a challenge,” Thomas goes on. Her mother, who had been a teacher, oversaw Angie’s education and looked after her own sick mother. “And fortunately for me, it wasn’t losing a friend like Starr did, but unfortunately it was that experience of my mom losing her job and my family going into that crisis mode.” Thomas was a teenager at the time, being home-schooled because she was experiencing mental health problems brought on by bullying. “When I started the book, I thought about what was the most traumatic thing in my life,” says Thomas. When Bri’s mother loses her job (as a secretary at a church, as it happens), and the family is faced with running out of food and then eviction, Bri has to fast-track her ambitions. The book’s protagonist, 16-year-old Bri, is obsessed with hip-hop – as Thomas herself is – and wants to make it as a rapper. But while her debut was more issue-led, On the Come Up is perhaps more personal to Thomas. Like THUG, it is set in Garden Heights, a fictional inner-city neighbourhood that is deprived and predominantly black.
Now Thomas is back with a follow-up, On the Come Up. “So I hold that over his head,” she says, and giggles. It does feel like a dream I’m going to wake up from.” Her agent now is one of the 150-plus who turned down her first book. “Oh, it’s definitely surreal,” says the 31-year-old Thomas, on the phone from Jackson. Last year, a film adaptation was released, which has been a critical and commercial success. It has now sold more than 2m copies globally. It was a hit here too, and named overall winner of the 2018 Waterstones children’s book prize. THUG, published in early 2017, went straight into the bestseller chart in the US and stayed there for a year. The story speeds up now: the novel became The Hate U Give ( THUG), a YA sensation about a 16-year-old girl called Starr who witnesses her friend Khalil being shot by the police and turns to activism.
Thomas’s break came when she cold-contacted a literary agent who was doing a Twitter Q&A. “Yeah, I had more than 150 rejections for that one,” says Thomas matter-of-factly.
She had previously written a children’s book, but hadn’t had any interest from agents. At nights – and during quiet periods in the day, she furtively admits – she worked on a young adult novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. Really not very long ago, Angie Thomas was a secretary to a bishop at a megachurch in Jackson, Mississippi. I n book publishing, it seems, they still do fairytales.
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