Amal

Amal is a 16-year-old boy with a budding artistic talent and promising future. He is imprisoned in the juvenile system for a fight with a group of white teenagers that led to one of them being hospitalized in a coma. As the novel winds and unfolds, readers begin to ask themselves if Amal was put away before he entered the juvenile justice system by an education system that did not nurture his talents and relied on prejudice to understand him and his background.

Amal entered the East Hills High School for the Arts with a passion for going his own way and creating on his own terms. He was confronted, however, by drier subject matter and more rules about what constituted “good” art than he was expecting, along with discounting by his art teacher about the validity of his questioning Eurocentric art education. When he is imprisoned, art...