Let me start with a disclosure: Shawn Setaro is a friend of mine. As anyone who is familiar with my reading habits will know,
Dummy Boy is not my usual fare. So, my decision to read it was not unbiased, and my review probably won't be either, but I do believe the fact that I tore through
Dummy Boy cover to cover in less than 24 hours is a testament to Shawn's writing and storytelling abilities. I listened to hip hop a lot as a teen and young adult – and I still love a lot of what I listened to back then, but my listening habits have not kept up with the times. I have, as far as I know, never heard a Tekashi 69 song. Inasmuch as I was aware of the events surrounding his career and trial, it was because of my friendship with Shawn – I read some of his reporting on it at the time. I'm not a podcast or a Spotify person, so I never did listen to
the podcast that Shawn created (sorry!). This might be considered a good thing in that it meant that most of the material covered in this book was new to me. Anyway, this story was a wild ride!
Dummy Boy is divided into two parts. The first half provides some biographical background on Tekashi's early life and then goes into a lot of detail on his career development, his rising fame, and his gang connections in Brooklyn. I was a little alarmed to discover how many key events in Tekashi's short career as a gangster took place within a few blocks of my home. The second half of the book is a play-by-play of the racketeering trial in which Tekashi was a key cooperating witness. Both halves are told with enough context for even someone wholly uninformed about the events to understand, and the story is compelling enough that I never lost interest in reading it – even lacking any specific interest in the people involved. While I imagine most readers who pick up this book will do so with some knowledge and curiosity about the events, I can attest that it's a thoroughly engaging read even for the reader who has neither.
