By Bethanne Patrick
FROM: L.A. Times

Christina Hammonds Reed vividly remembers witnessing the unrest in her city in 1992 after the acquittal of four LAPD officers in the arrest and beating of Rodney King — on television. She was only 8, after all, and the violence in South L.A. felt far away. She grew up in the comfortable suburb of Hacienda Heights.

“I remember watching the news, seeing people who looked like me who were angry and frustrated,” she says. “I knew something had gone terribly wrong.”

It wasn’t until Hammonds Reed was in college at USC that she connected her childhood memories to a deeper reality. “I saw Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman play, ‘Twilight,’ and one of her characters was a USC student talking about being afraid as the riots got into full swing,” says the author. “That showed me we all are affected by things that happen when we’re in the same place.”

Hammonds Reed’s debut young-adult novel, “The Black Kids,” takes place during that surreal week in 1992, following 17-year-old Ashley through her last days as a private-school senior, including a prom-night drive through the heart of the unrest.

Although the protests and violence stemmed as much from long-simmering community tension as from the officers’ acquittal, the case became a channel for Black rage in America, the same rage that has surfaced recently in response to the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other unarmed Black people. Read Rest of Review Here