Alfonso Jones is a Black teenager shot and killed by an off-duty police officer working as a department store security guard in the opening pages of this graphic novel. Alfonso was shopping for his first suit when another customer reported him as behaving suspiciously. The cop said Alfonso had a gun. He didn’t: He was holding a hanger from a suit he was trying on. Alfonso’s story unfolds in chapters and scenes moving back and forth between the present— he is among ghosts on a subway car, looking in on the survivors of his own life—and the past. The past includes more of Alfonso’s life and family story. His dad was about to get out of prison, having just been exonerated with DNA evidence proving he did not rape and murder a woman years before. The other ghosts on the train are all other victims of police violence (based on real people). Their presence draws a direct line across decades: What happened to Alfonso has happened to so many others (notes in the back provide information about the “real” people who are ghosts on the train, including Henry Dumas, a black writer shot and killed by police in 1968 and for whom Alfonso’s school is named) in a work that also connects the activism of Black Lives Matter to the long history of Black resistance and protest. (Age 11 and older)

The Hate U Give meets The Lovely Bones in this unflinching graphic novel about the afterlife of a young man killed by an off-duty police officer, co-illustrated by New York Times bestselling artist John Jennings.

Alfonso Jones can't wait to play the role of Hamlet in his school's hip-hop rendition of the classic Shakespearean play. He also wants to let his best friend, Danetta, know how he really feels about her. But as he is buying his first suit, an off-duty police officer mistakes a clothes hanger for a gun, and he shoots Alfonso.

When Alfonso wakes up in the afterlife, he's on a ghost train guided by well-known victims of police shootings, who teach him what he needs to know about this subterranean spiritual world. Meanwhile, Alfonso's family and friends struggle with their grief and seek justice for Alfonso in the streets. As they confront their new realities, both Alfonso and those he loves realize the work that lies ahead in the fight for justice.

Foreword by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy