" I'm embarrassed by how quickly I got hooked on this book. Playground is the story of a troubled outcast who, through an act of violence, goes from being a school-nobody to the school bully. Told from a first-person perspective, this story uses Butterball's sessions with his therapist as the starting point for his tangential descriptions of his life. While he faces the challenges that many middle school students tackle--feeling left out, poor self-image, peer pressure and popularity struggles--his is somewhat unique as it centers on his life in a suburb of New York City. His mother has moved him away from the more commonly discussed pressures of urban life for young, African-American men (although his encounters with his rascal dad who still scrapes by in the inner-city still touch on some of these distinct challenges). I think this book in many ways touched on some new issues that aren't as widely discussed. For example, how does a child who grew up in the inner-city respond to a life in the suburbs? How does a family find balance between it's traditional family history and surging forward with a new path? And how do parents seek out a better future without compromising family life? While the path of this book is somewhat straightforward (although one twist regarding Butterball's mother caught me slightly off-guard and was, I thought, an interesting way to discuss identity in our contemporary world.
I will have a copy of this book in my middle school classroom. While I imagine it was not 50 Cent, but a ghostwriter who crafted the actual story, the draw of a rapper author and a new urban story is one that I think would appeal to my own urban scholars. "
— Sam, 1/25/2014