A review by scribblerrva
Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes

3.0

As someone who WAS a hip-hop loving teenager in 2002 and fell in love with spoken word poetry around that time, thanks to HBO’s “Def Poetry”, I thought it was a decent read that spoke about a time that I could relate to. However, it is BECAUSE I was the same age as the kids in the book when it was published, there were so many moments where the dialogue was just laughably inaccurate for the time period to the point where I went through and highlighted every spot I could think of where things felt inauthentic. It was like someone trying who write a character saying phrases in a foreign language without being a native speaker (and there were points in this story where that happened too). It was a good book, but it could have been better.