There are no heroes in Way Past Cool.

Only Markita, a teenaged single mother working long shifts and going to night school, has any of the qualities of a heroic figure, and even she knows the ways of violence. Fundamentally, the novel is about violence, about how violence shapes the lives of everyone in the small territory of the Friends. This is not to say that Way Past Cool is about nothing else. It is in fact a complex novel that can be fully understood in terms of how several themes are used to create a sophisticated portrait of a society in which the fear of violence is always present, in which such fear shapes everything people do, and in which acts of violence alter lives completely from what they were only a day before.

Mowry binds together his narrative about a neighborhood by...