When the system forgets you, you learn to survive loud. This is a raw, urgent novel about youth, injustice, and the cost of being seen only...

When the system forgets you, you learn to survive loud. This is a raw, urgent novel about youth, injustice, and the cost of being seen only when you’re already breaking.

Kiara is seventeen and barely surviving in East Oakland. With her mother gone, her brother lost in dreams of rap stardom, and rent due, she finds herself pulled into a dangerous world just to keep a roof over their heads. But when her involvement with the police explodes into public scandal, Kiara becomes the unwilling center of a city’s shame and a symbol of its reckoning.

Told in visceral, lyrical prose, this novel is not just about injustice, it’s about voice. About who gets to speak. About how you hold onto your humanity when the world refuses to see you.

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📗 In The Mood For…

Understanding Myself
Kiara’s story is a mirror of survival, grief, and unwanted maturity.
✅ A raw, interior look at girlhood under pressure
✅ Explores identity shaped by struggle, silence, and resistance

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📘 Stories About…

Power & Resistance
At its core, this is a novel about exploitation, systemic failure, and fighting back even when you never asked to be the one holding the mic.
✅ Exposes institutional abuse without reducing its characters to victims
✅ A story of quiet, furious defiance

Pain, Suffering & Recovery
This book doesn’t flinch from trauma, from loneliness, or from the long road to healing.
✅ Harrowing, but tender where it counts
✅ Honors the complexity of living through what should break you

The Weight of Choices
Every decision Kiara makes is loaded with danger, with consequence, with the ache of not having better options.
✅ Survival is both necessity and burden
✅ Asks: What do you owe to your family, your body, your truth?