Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)
"Yoo offers a grim and well-researched account of an event that teen readers may have heard of, but likely do not know about with any detail… Dozens of interviews and quotes are seamlessly integrated to make a flowing and compelling narrative."
From the Publisher
"Winner of the YALSA Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award"
Horn Book Magazine (starred review)
"Using extensive research and original reporting, Yoo creates deeply humanizing portraits of King; Harlins; Edward Jae Song Lee, a young man killed trying to protect a pizza parlor; and their families... A powerful and compelling history book that shows how the past still affects the present."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-02-17
An account of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, focusing particularly on the stories of Rodney King, Latasha Harlins, and Eddie Lee.
Protests erupted in Los Angeles County in April 1992, following the shocking acquittal of four police officers accused of using excessive force in brutally beating King, an unarmed Black man, during a traffic arrest in March 1991. Latasha, a 15-year-old Black girl, also died in March 1991, after being fatally shot from behind by South Korean immigrant store owner Soon Ja Du following a dispute over a bottle of orange juice. Readers get to know King as a loving father, Latasha as a poet and honor student, and Du as a wife and mother working 14-hour days without respite. With tensions already high due to Du’s incredibly lenient sentencing in November 1991, violence exploded hours after the acquittal of King’s attackers a few months later. Eddie Lee, an 18-year-old Korean American college student, went with friends—against his mother’s wishes—to help protect Koreatown shops that were going up in flames and was shot to death, caught in the crossfire between demonstrators and store owners and becoming a symbol of the tragedy. Using scores of interviews, direct quotes, news reports, and archival photographs to sculpt this thoroughly researched history, Yoo vividly and movingly conveys the broader historical context and the many lives that were affected, shedding light on systemic challenges that continue today.
A nuanced and necessary narrative. (maps, author’s note, in memoriam list, endnotes, bibliography, credits, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)
