Nathanael Lessore’s bright, lively debut, Dropping Beats (Little, Brown, February 11), is an obvious choice for our Best YA Books of 2025 list with its irresistible combination of witty wordplay, propulsive plot, and charming protagonist. Thirteen-year-old aspiring rapper Growls is navigating online humiliation, an unrequited crush, a missing best friend, and financial stress at home. Originally published in the U.K. in 2023 as Steady for This, the book won the Branford Boase Award and was shortlisted for the Yoto Carnegie Medal and the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize. Lessore answered questions by email.

What originally inspired Dropping Beats?

I was home alone during the pandemic. I’d watched everything on Netflix and got to the point where I was reenacting scenes from Tangled to entertain myself. I decided to write something, just to see if I could. I wanted to show my London neighborhood to be the vibrant, community-friendly place I grew up in. All the news articles were negative, and I wanted to show that there was so much more to my area than a crime-ridden stereotype.

We don’t have enough genuinely funny books for teens that also address challenging topics.

 I was always told to “write what you know.” What I know is that I was a goofy kid who grew up in a fun area that had a bad reputation. The majority of scenes are taken from experiences that happened to me or people around me. I once got stuck in a pram in public and had to wriggle around in my underwear to get free. I had a cockroach fall out of my pocket on a visit to the doctor. My aunt used to call me “Head in the Clouds,” and that’s how Growls’ voice developed. I wasn’t depressed about being poor because everyone was poor and I didn’t know what I was missing. My book is a comedy because life is funny and absurd, but conflict and serious issues are also a reality.

I appreciate how the U.S. edition preserved the richness of the original slang.

The thing I love about reading is that I get to experience life through someone else’s eyes. One minute I’m in Nigeria experiencing the Biafran War in Half of a Yellow Sun [by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie] and the next I’m on a road trip through the gothic South thanks to Flannery O’Connor. The authenticity of characters and places is what transports me, and my editor’s keeping the British slang hopefully does the same.

Were you a keen reader as a teen?

I wasn’t a keen reader at all; it was considered geeky. That changed when Malorie Blackman wrote the Naughts and Crosses series—reading suddenly became cool. I studied creative writing at university, [but] one editor told us that if you’re not a posh white lady, you don’t have much of a chance, so I decided to go into marketing instead. When my book got published, my day job was writing articles about plug sockets.

What responses to the book mean the most to you?

Parents, librarians, and teachers tell me that teenagers who never read loved Dropping Beats. Many reluctant readers tell me that this was the first book they enjoyed. On school visits, the most disruptive teens are the first to barge to the front of the queue and get their books signed—this at a time when, more than ever, teenage boys need empathy, kindness, and open-mindedness from any source they can get it from. I think that in the past, intolerant voices were given a microphone, and right now they’re being given a megaphone. Young people especially are exposed to intolerant ways of thinking, and books are an antidote to that poison.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.