In IT'S LIKE CANDY, River and Starr are sisters who get a bad break early in life. Their father leaves home when he can no longer stomach his wife's infidelity, spurred by her drug addiction. Having no father at home to love and care for them, especially given their mother's continued spiral downward, would be bad enough. But that's only the beginning for these two young women.

Both women are sexually abused at their mother's insistence to help pay for her addiction. As a result, they both ultimately run away and turn to a life of crime, including prostitution, holdups, and forced participation in increasingly more violent crimes.

Yet both sisters hold on to the possibility that life has more to offer them. River discovers this when she begins to have feelings for one of her marks. Starr's lesson follows a brutal beating that places her in the hospital.

But is it too late for these young women to turn their lives around? They have not seen each other in five years but their lives parallel one another. Even after the seed of hope begins to bud, they find it difficult to turn away from street life. They find their lives are not their own, as each is indebted to the criminal enterprise—and its leaders—that provides them with money, clothing, and other means of survival. Will they find a way out before it's too late?

Mr. Gray has penned an intriguing novel which draws the reader in immediately and doesn't let go until the last page is turned. Although street lit is not my preferred genre, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Yes, it is graphic, in terms of profanity, sex, and violence, but I never found any of it to be gratuitous or overdone, as I, if I am to be honest, wholly expected. The plot is so well crafted, and the characters so well portrayed—no matter how heinous they might be—that I had no choice but to keep reading to find out what would become of River and Starr. I don't mean that to be condescending in any way. This book, although fiction, very much reminded me of gritty memoirs I'd read as a teen that would be the precursors to today's street lit, books like MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND by Claude McKay or THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X by Alex Haley. Raw, gritty, and consuming. IT'S LIKE CANDY was impossible to put down. I've added Mr. Gray to my list of authors to watch.