by her hardworking parents. Found attractive, fa-
vored and doted on by family and friends primar-
ily because of her light skin and almond-shaped
hazel eyes, Tracy, during her teens and high school
years, is, fundamentally selfish and rambunc-
tious. She is willing to do almost anything to lure
the most popular boys in the neighborhood, only
to exploit and intimidate them. By the time she
is 16, her identity is wrapped up in the designer
clothing, jewelry, behavior, and the fast-paced life-
style that earns her the enviable title of “flyy girl”
(which means an attractive and beautiful girl in
hip-hop culture), like her former neighbor and
friend, Mercedes. Mercedes’s philosophy is shown
in her advice to Tracy on how she should treat her
boyfriends: “don’t give tem nothin’ unless they
got something to give you.... get a nice-looking
nut dude with some money and romance his ass.
If you can get somethin’ without doing anything
with him, then do it. But if you can’t, then make
sure you play with his mind real good before you
do” (212–213). However, by age 17, seeing the shal-
lowness and ephemerality of such advice, Tracy re-
solves to embrace a more responsible, quality-filled
lifestyle as she moves toward true womanhood. In
both For the Love of Money (2000) and Boss Lady,
sequels to Flyy Girl, Tyree revisits Tracy’s growth,
development, and success as a professional, movie
star, producer, and astute businesswoman.
In Flyy Girl Tyree offers deft insight into urban
life and teen hip-hop culture in America during
the 1980s. Although Tracy and her friends lack the
sophistication of CLAUDE BROWN’s protagonist in
MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND, they, too, are Af-
rican-American teens who, to a large degree, grow
up prematurely in a drug-infested world. They
seem irresponsible as they nonchalantly experience
traditional adolescent rites of passage and rituals,
particularly those related to their sexual identities
as young men and women, with abandon. Adoles-
cent girls readily lose their virginity to handsome
but totally irresponsible young boys merely to be
identified as their conquerors’ girlfriends. How-
ever, Tyree’s sexually active, aggressive teenage
girls do not seem to worry about getting pregnant
or contracting sexually transmitted diseases. The
exception is Raheema, Tracy’s neighbor and off-
and-on friend.
In Flyy Girl, Tyree successfully captures the
urban, hip-hop language of his characters. At teen
parties, boys wearing gold-framed Neostyle glasses
(which cost more than $150) attend expecting to
“rack up” or collect many phone numbers. Their
dialogue and exchange is almost monosyllabic:
“I’on know” (I don’t know), “Aw’ight” (all right),
“What ’chew think?” (What do you think?). They
do “The Wop” and dance to The Boogie Boys’s hit
rap song “Flyy Girl,” “The Show” by Slick Rick and
Doug E. Fresh, “Computer Love” by Zapp, and “Do
Me Baby” by Mel’isa Morgan.
From the outset, Tyree has been identified as
a talented new voice. He was particularly lauded
for his use of dialogue. According to Shirley Gib-
son Coleman, “Tyree has a way [of] making each
phrase of every conversation true to life, whether
spoken by a child or an adult” (98). Writing as
The Urban Griot, under his new line of “hard
core novels,” Tyree contributed “Human Heat” to
Dark Thirst: An Anthology, a collection of origi-
nal vampire stories by African-American writers
published by Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing
Group in 2004. He has also released a spoken-
word album, Rising Up (2003), and he added Cold
Blooded (2004), a novel, to his Urban Griot series
featuring Big Bronze. His novel What They Want
was published in 2006. The recipient of the 2001
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF
COLORED PEOPLE Image Award for Outstanding
Literary Work in Fiction, Tyree lives in Charlotte,
North Carolina, with his wife, Karintha, and two
sons, Ameer and Canoy.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coleman, Shirley Gibson. Review, Library Journal.
September 1996, p. 98.
Review, Publishers Weekly, October 1996.
Tyree, Omar. Flyy Girl. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1996.
Wilfred D. SamuelsTyree, Omar 515