Upstate is an unusual novel
since it is in the form of letters between two people, Antonio and Natasha. 
Antonio is in jail, at first, waiting for his trial for the murder of his
father, who was stabbed at the family home over a dozen times.  It is 1990, and
the two young people are boyfriend and girlfriend, 16 and 15, African American,
from Harlem, New York City.  At first Antonio is hopeful that he will win his trial,
but he is being tried as an adult and he is not getting good legal advice.  As
he writes about the trial, it is revealed that his father was abusive and that
he had planned to kill his father.  So when it is clear that the trial is going
badly, he Antonio agrees to plead guilty to manslaughter and he is sent to an
upstate prison for a ten-year sentence.  Of course, Antonio finds it very
difficult in the prison, and although he and Natasha plan to stay together
until he gets out, they come to realize eventually that it is not a realistic
plan. 

Of course, Buckhanon sets herself a
difficult task, because most teenagers have such poor writing skills that
reading their letters would be utterly tedious.  So she adds to the plot the
added ingredient that both of them are very smart and eloquent, even though
they were not studious in high school.  Antonio spent a lot of his time getting
high and the two of them were often sneaking off to have sex.  So Buckhanon
makes the letters quite believable, and both characters seem young and naïve at
the start.  In fact, getting through the book takes some perseverance since
they are full of unrealistic expectations for the first three quarters, and it
is only towards the book’s end that they really start to grow and face their
situations and the difficulty staying together. 

The audiobook version of this book
is performed well by Chadwick Boseman and Heather Simms, since they bring out
the strong emotions in the words and they make it easy to understand the
African-American 1990s slang and dialect, which might be challenging for some
readers in the text version.  The book is occasionally sexually explicit and
has a fair amount of profanity, so it might not be suitable for some young
people. 

The strength of Upstate lies
in its ability to convey the pressures on young black people and how the
demands of images of masculinity and toughness make some young black men ill
prepared to deal with life.  At one point, Antonio says from prison that if he
had been more able to express his emotions when he was younger, he might not
have ended up where he was.  We also see Natasha grow in her self-confidence
and progress from a struggling high school student to a woman with a
professional career.  But the downside of the format is that it becomes
tiresome to go through years of letters written with a lot of slang, and I was
glad to get to the end of this short book when it eventually came. 

© 2005 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.