I Am Alfonso Jones

Review
By Tanita Davis, author of PEAS AND CARROTS and MARE'S WAR

This story of love and rage is conveyed with a surreal cast of characters. Alfonso’s story, and the stories of the others on the ghost subway will both grieve and inform, allowing readers to access the language to talk about class and race discrimination, and the very real fact of the American propensity for violence by police against people of minority race and class. There is no solution to Alfonso’s murder, no tidy wrap-up of his death in which the rest of his community lives happily ever after, but they do live, as we do—in love and defiance, never forgetting that justice has not been served.