Child Boss - Paperback

Child Boss follows a young boy who's dedicated to becoming a tenacious baller. But his overworked mother can't afford to nourish his dreams by giving him exposure to top talent, and his highly educated father doesn't make money. This leads the boy to seek work at twelve.

Playful and unflinching, Child Boss throws its narrator into the humiliations and pains of being a worker. Moving between desire, free markets, debt, basketball courts, private golf courses, family arguments, school, high-revving engines, and subversive humor, the novel probes how a young boy metabolizes and resists a world marred by precarity, labor, competition, value, and exchange.

Child Boss obliterates and reconfigures the boundaries between boyhood and manhood, boss and worker, kindness and exploitation, public and private life, tenderness and brutality. It creates openings to interrogate how social, cultural, and economic rituals of domination seep into and structure daily life. It asks: How might we intervene and develop alternatives to the overbearing weight of capitalism and what it does to people? How can we nourish rituals that reward connection and humanity, not extraction and dehumanization?