Title: Concealed Weapons: Celebrating the Courage of Today’s Abandoned American Youth
Author: Alana Renee’
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 978-1-4500-7644-9
Pages: 178
Genre: Fiction
Reviewed By: Candace L. Barr
Pacific Book Review
Concealed Weapons is an anthology that presents short stories of youths overcoming adversity while growing up in some of the more dangerous cities of New Jersey. Among the stories are mostly true and engaging telling of the author’s own struggles. Through these narratives, Alana Renee’ presents alternatives to hopelessness. Some of the tales are heartbreaking, and while it’s a young adult anthology the author skirts around using profanity, the book is definitely for a more mature reader—but as the book illustrates, we can’t measure maturity solely in terms of age.
The strength of the anthology lies in its characters. Each protagonist, from the aspiring doctor to the exploited runaway, to Alana Renee’ herself is someone the reader wants to see win and end up on the right side of the law. The supporting characters also do a great job of fleshing out the tales and showing the main characters’ motivations in their journeys. One of my favorite side characters is the passionate but frustrated principal whose students are featured in two of the stories—a tough but caring man who just wants his students to succeed even when he can’t get the funding to help make it happen. In addition to providing a helpful authority figure, his inclusion supports the theme of creativity in the face of adversity which runs throughout the book.
While the stories are inspiring and do impart some great information which can be used in real life to the reader, at times they can read like an information pamphlet. The background information and websites for organizations and programs mentioned in the stories take away from the reader immersion and would be better placed on a summary page after each story or in a resource section at the end of the book rather than awkwardly placed in the narrative. Separating the information would also give the benefit of being able to give more details about each resource. Aside from this and scattered grammatical errors, the stories read smoothly with a down-to-earth narrative and dialogue and would catch the attention of its intended audience.
Having grown up in and adjacent to a struggling New Jersey city myself and having seen the advantages those who live only a few miles away are exposed to by merely being born in the right place, I see the value in the options Renee’ presents to the teenagers coming up in a society that often counts them out. “Concealed Weapons” isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a solid entry into urban young adult fiction.
