My Time Will Come

April 1, 2021
Readers may be familiar with author Manuel if they've read Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy (2014), which features some of Manuel's story as well as his poetry. In this memoir, Manuel shares his account of being tried as an adult and sentenced to life without parole at the age of 13 for armed robbery and attempted murder. For the next 18 years he was kept in solitary confinement, rarely getting visitors and having no one to advocate for him. He formed an unlikely relationship with the woman that he shot, and while they sometimes didn't communicate for years at a time, she became one of his biggest allies, showing up to every hearing for support. But it wasn't until Stevenson (who provides a foreword) and his organization the Equal Justice Initiative stepped in that Manuel had a real chance at freedom. Manuel sprinkles his poetry throughout the book, and while there is a wish that a bit more of that lyricism leaked into the prose, his story is heartbreaking and hopeful and needs to be told.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2021
An unsparing memoir about the cruel, long-unexamined policy of sentencing juveniles to life in prison. Manuel's account is both heart-wrenching and uplifting. An impoverished, disturbed youth, he received a life sentence for a nonlethal shooting during a robbery attempt, and he spent 18 years in solitary confinement, starting at age 15. As legal activist Bryan Stevenson, who aided Manuel through his Equal Justice Initiative, notes in the foreword, "His abusive isolation was justified by misguided protocols and a devastating lack of understanding about adolescent development, mental health, or behavioral science. What happened to Ian is beyond cruel but sadly not unique." Manuel chillingly portrays his deprived upbringing in a high-crime Tampa neighborhood. "I hurt someone very badly during a time in my life when I was blinded by my own hurt," he writes. Although pressured by older boys, the author was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14. The prosecutor, he writes "was advancing a prevalent view at the time about boys of color"--that they were "super predators." Manuel vividly captures the terror of an adolescent thrust into adult incarceration and the added trauma of solitary confinement. He portrays the prison bureaucracy as arbitrary in its amplification of punitive measures, including routine beatings and tear-gassings. While in prison, the author began corresponding with the woman he'd shot, who ultimately forgave him. During his time in solitary, writing poetry helped maintain his sanity, and his sharp verse punctuates his narrative. In 2006, EJI reached out to Manual as part of an effort to overturn the life sentences of 73 children for nonhomicide crimes. The EJI, writes the author, "sought to base its case on the unconstitutionality of cruel and unusual punishment...a Hail Mary pass, as I saw it." Surprisingly, the Supreme Court concurred, leading to Manuel's release. "The world was all before me now," he writes, "but what exactly did that mean?" A disturbing, vital, necessary eyewitness addition to debates about the mass incarceration epidemic in the U.S.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 26, 2021
An ex-con reflects on the shocking crime and even more shocking sentence that blighted his life in this heart-wrenching debut. In 1990, the then 13-year-old Manuel shot young mother Debbie Baigrie during a street robbery in Tampa, Fla. Baigrie recovered, but Manuel was sentenced to life without parole. “That would be the last day my mother and I would touch,” he writes. What followed was a harrowing, decades-long journey through Florida’s prisons, where beatings and sprayings with irritant gases were routine. The situation deteriorated drastically after he was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement for infractions as minor as asking for clean sheets, and ended up being kept there for 18 years—a deranging ordeal that prompted him to cut and burn himself. But his story took an unlikely turn after a judicial rights group took up his case. He reconciled with Baigrie, leading to his release from prison in 2016. Manuel’s account, told in prose and poetry, is gritty and unflinching (“I hear coughs and gaspings/ from multiple gassings./ And boots and fist against flesh”), and poignant throughout. The result is a gripping narrative about a man’s struggle to prove his discarded existence still has meaning. This is a stunner.

May 1, 2021

The literature on Black people in the U.S. prison system has often focused on the incarceration of adults and ignored the thousands of children who are housed in adult jails. In his memoir, Manuel, who is Black, provides a firsthand look at how the nation treats these children. In 1991, a 14-year-old Manuel was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for shooting a young woman during a robbery. His trial came in an era when politicians were promoting the superpredator theory, which predicted a rise in crime and violence from Black youth. Manuel spent his next 25 years in the Florida prison system, 18 of them in solitary confinement. The Equal Justice Initiative appealed his case and secured his release from prison in 2016. Manuel's book argues that the U.S. legal system is a weapon used against Black youth. It is also the story of a man who came of age behind bars and found refuge in reading and writing poetry. VERDICT Manuel provides a firsthand account of the U.S. prison system's inhumanity for minors, and he writes a compelling call for change. A raw look at the intersection of the U.S. legal system, racism, and trauma.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.