Black teenager Amal Shahid, convicted of assaulting a white teenager who remains unconscious, didn't take a plea bargain; he knows he left the fight before the boy was seriously injured. A pulls-no-punches novel-in-verse follows Amal from the final day of his trial into juvenile prison. Flashbacks recount the day of the fight, when the racist taunts of the boy and his friends in their gentrifying neighborhood led to Amal throwing the first punch, as well as the trial itself (the testimony of his well-meaning white art teacher, who clearly doesn't truly see Amal and only reinforces the perception of him as an angry Black teen, is particularly unsettling). In prison, the threat of violence comes from fellow inmates and racist guards alike, while Amal's ineffectual social worker doesn't see or refuses to comprehend his reality. Amal's family life is anchored by the love and expectations of his Black Muslim mother, Umi; he knows he let her down. Struggling with depression while incarcerated, poet and artist Amal finds respite and release in a class taught by a visiting poet. The spoken-word poems Amal writes-and this novel-in-verse narrative as a whole-are powerful, illuminating, heartrending, including the ongoing theme exploring the parallel between the prison pipeline and slavery. Coauthor Yusef Salaam is one of the five Black men exonerated after serving time for the "Central Park jogger" case. Like his story, Amal's ends with hope, but not before it illuminates and indicts racism. (Age 13 and older)