Wow, this was bad, the writing was terrible. It's the story of a dude named Bilal, or Gorilla Black, growing up in the Richmond, VA projects during the 1980s. His little brother gets killed and Black goes off. After serving time in juvey (7 years!) for beating up his Momma's man, he comes back to the hood, eventually turning to dealing drugs and murdering enemies. Yeah yeah yeah. I guess the good thing about this book is you do feel for the characters (sometimes, like Keon's murder), but the way the story jumps along with such a ludicrous pace, it's hard to hold on to that. Author Seven spends so much time writing redundant and ridiculous dialog that she never actually SHOWS how Black moves up to become a kingpin gangster. And the editing is awful too, words were misspelled and phrases just written wrong, and I'm not talking about the slang here. Also, Black claims to quote Shakespeare all the time but he only talks about one poem twice and recites it once. A great premise, but as the reader, I ain't buying that he's all like that. Anyway, I guess the only reason to read it is if you're from RVA and you wanna hear about all the places she mentions so you can imagine them in your head yourself, because she surely didn't give good description. As much as I was hoping (by the cool cover and title) that this book was going to be along the lines of an Iceberg Slim or Donald Goines, it was a far cry from it. A let down and I am a bit surprised that Nikki Turner picked this to kick off her NT Presents series. Surely there is better written hood fiction out there? ( )