HARD TIMES

The shooting of an unarmed high school student in Chicago tripwires a series of disruptions and revelations involving police corruption and a Black teacher’s uneasy family life.

Buddy Mack is the kind of dedicated English teacher any public school would be lucky to have, especially in Chicago’s volatile South Side, whose Mayfield High enrolls many poor or at-risk students. Three of these kids especially concern Buddy: Zeke, who’s great at football, but not so great at staying out of trouble, whether it’s a pregnant girlfriend or detention; Dontell, whose unruly behavior camouflages a mind enabling him to “just look at a textbook and everything inside would download into his brain”; and Zeke’s cousin Truth, a moody, smooth-talking sophomore with relatives engaged in unsavory criminal activities. Buddy’s own life away from his job is almost as chaotic as his students’. He’s married to an ambitious corporate lawyer eager for upward mobility to the city’s posh North Side, even though Buddy’s not so sure he wants to leave Hyde Park behind. Buddy wrestles with the level of his commitment to his community in fitful discussions with his brother-in-law, Curtis, a corrupt patrolman who subdues his self-loathing with heavy drinking and resentment toward Buddy that borders on envy. The tangled lives of all these adults and teens converge in explosive fashion when Truth is shot by Curtis while carrying out a mysterious errand for one of his crooked relatives. The ramifications of that errand and its outcome have shattering effects on the seemingly disparate worlds of both Buddy and his students. Boyd’s impressive command of his engrossing novel’s multiple points of view is matched by his compassion for his often perplexing but always engaging characters. The novel’s heart and its smarts are almost as big as Buddy Mack’s own.

An urban high school novel that puts humanity far ahead of sociology.