The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race for a Gun, and a Community United to Save Them

An inexperienced teenager takes over his older cousin’s drug business and lands in hot water in this fast-paced if somewhat shopworn look at the roots of Chicago’s gun violence. Ethnographer Venkatesh (Floating City) explains how 17-year-old Frankie Paul immediately faced insubordination, supplier issues, and threats from competitors after his cousin Willie went to prison for gun trafficking. When a group of kids brazenly robbed the novice dealers Frankie hired to replace his cousin’s veteran crew, he tried to restore his street cred by coming down hard on Marshall Mariot, an “ordinary” kid he regularly bullied at school. But Marshall decided to fight back and got his friends together to help him buy a gun, setting the stage for a showdown that various community members tried to prevent. Venkatesh has impressive access to this drama, which unfolds over the course of a few weeks, but he imbues the narrative with a morality tale’s sensibility and renders the key players involved—including a street-smart preacher, an evenhanded cop, and a good-hearted gun runner—more as stock characters than real people. Still, this is a dramatic and accessible deconstruction of the social conditions that give rise to criminal behavior. (June)