
Young Junius is not your son’s gangsta story. Seth Harwood tells the story of crack’s impact on Cambridge’s destitute Rindge Towers with Shakespeare’s sophisticated sensibilities. The events might be straight out of a DMX song, but they’re woven together by thoughtful plotting the summons the spirit of Hamlet.
The appeal of Young Junius is more than the symphonic skill Harwood composes the plot—it’s that indecision and regret are the demons that drive the piece. This renders the story with a core of realism while resonating with the kind of complexity found in classic literature. Hamlet could well be a distant cousin, with its large cast of haunted characters, its hand wringing and its cataclysmic collision of a climax.
The title character, Junius Posey, is fired up over the murder of a family member—his brother, Temple—and is looking to make someone pay. But just like the famous prince of Denmark, this young buck of Cambridge is unsure both how and who will bleed to balance the scales for Temple’s killing. With his charming companion, Elf, at his side, Junius wanders into the political power plays of a housing project crack war and becomes a pawn on a chessboard populated by similarly struggling characters.
In the parlance of the big-label rap that its dialogue resonates with, Seth Harwood’s Young Junius is more about falsing than about fronting. Most of its personalities are trying to act bigger than they are while figuring out who to be in the process. Harwood’s strength is in balancing the soul-searching with the pulse-pounding. He lures the reader into a page-turner of a plot and then slows his roll to give you a glimpse at the inner life of the warriors. The effect keeps you lashed to a mast in this crack-fueled storm—as soon as we catch our breath by visiting the mind of one of the characters, we’re propelled around another twist that demands we keep reading to see what happens.
Young Junius needs those kinds of hooks to secure the reader’s experience. It’s a vast work with a sprawling world of characters, all with different aims and fast trajectories. Without the plot sprinting and jogging, it could easily mire into a rogue’s gallery of character study. It doesn’t, and that’s why this work is proof of Harwood’s excellence—that he could take such a massive subject as the Rindge Towers on his shoulders and still manage to make our hearts race.

It should come as no surprise that a story of bloody vengeance in the slums is not for the cozy crowd. Any reader would be hard pressed not to find a poetic value in the souls and tender stories that inform the character’s lives, but we are here to witness those lives end in carnage. Still, I recommend it to any lover of crime fiction. Young Junius delivers epic scope and personal insight between the same covers. Outrageous as the slings and arrows of Rindge Towers’ fortune may be, their tragedy is rendered so skillfully that they deserve your audience.