Autobiography of My Dead Brother (review)

Jesse and Rise have been close, more like brothers than friends, since Jesse was one and Rise was almost three. Now Jesse's fifteen, a talented young artist who's always sketching or working on his comic strip, and he's noticing some changes in his friend: "Now I was getting the feeling that when Rise was saying one thing, there was something else going on behind the words." Especially after a drive-by shooting takes the life of one friend of theirs and another goes to jail, Rise is adopting a persona of cool toughness; he's beginning to consider selling drugs and trying to turn their generations-old Harlem social club, the Counts, into something a lot less tame. Ultimately Jesse realizes that the Rise who was his blood brother has become someone else, a Rise whom Jesse can no longer trust or follow. Jesse's plainspoken but emotional narration credibly captures the viewpoint of a young man whose life is changing, and he's not yet sure in which direction. Myers makes his protagonist particularly articulate about the pressures to appear strong and defiant, whether it's toward the police ("Everybody knew we had to have cops around so the thugees wouldn't rule, but we had to be all like 'don't be in my face with it' at the same time") or in one's own eyes ("I just decided I can't be limping all my life," says Jesse's mild-mannered friend C.J.). Rise's eventual death by shooting is sad but largely inevitable, and while the book doesn't offer any false guarantees of safety for Jesse, there's at least hope for him in his questioning of the dangerous power his friend sought. Christopher Myers' renditions of Jesse's black-and-white sketches have the talented literalness plausible in a gifted teen artist, and his graphic-novel-type insets and comic-strip panels add further accessibility to this absorbing read.