LOS ANGELES — Filmmaker and former teacher Nick Brooks made headlines with a seven-figure book deal from Macmillan for his debut novel, “Promise Boys.” Now, the book is finally here with Brooks kicking off a book launch tour at The Grove in Los Angeles. The book is a murder mystery set in a Washington, D.C., charter school, and features three Black teens as main characters. Black male authors are rare in the young adult category, and books featuring Black male characters are even more so.
“When I was teaching I didn’t have a lot of books that I could go to that my students could make text-to-self connections for, because the characters they didn’t look like them. They didn’t sound like them. They didn’t come from the same communities that they came from,” Brooks said.
The book is both a page-turning murder mystery and a commentary on the themes of social justice and educational inequities, but Brooks said he was just writing from the heart.
“I came into it just knowing I was passionate. Passionate about telling stories that featured young boys of color because I’m a Black man. I grew up as a Black boy in D.C., and that’s the population that I worked with,” Brooks said.
David Hunter Jr., a former teacher turned producer, who attended the launch, also knows the importance of representation.
“There wasn’t a lot of material for our Black teen students. Also, he’s a Black man. You know, we don’t even see a lot of Black male educators. When I taught, I taught at a small private school. I was the only Black teacher there that was a man. So seeing this — this come from his voice, his perspective. He looks like the students he’s talking to. He comes from where they come from. I think it’s very important that they can relate to him a little bit more. He speaks the language,” Hunter Jr. said.
Research group WordsRated found that only 12% of children’s bestsellers are about Black characters, and only 8% were by Black authors. In 2021, more than half of the Black main characters in the bestsellers were female.
Author of “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” George Johnson moderated a conversation with Brooks at the launch. Johnson, whose memoir about growing up Black and queer is considered one of the most banned in the country partly because of its LGBTQ content, said this kind of work is necessary.
“It’s super important that we start to have storytelling where young Black boys specifically can feel seen in a book. I grew up reading books with characters that did not look like me, they didn’t have experiences like me. And when you grow up not seeing yourself reflected in the world, you sometimes don’t even know that people like you exist,” Johnson said.
Brooks hopes that “Promise Boys” will spark a movement and inspire young Black boys to write and tell their own stories. The novel is now on shelves, waiting to be discovered by new readers.