Sole Purpose

Chicago, 1997.

Thirteen-year-old Antonio Williams wants one thing: a pair of Air Jordan XIIIs.

Not because he thinks sneakers will make him somebody.

Because earning them might prove that he already is.

Antonio spends the summer working alongside his three best friends, Darnell, Reggie, and Malik, each boy determined to earn his own $150. Between neighborhood jobs, basketball, family drama, first love, and the complicated shadow of Antonio's murdered older brother, the boys begin discovering that growing up comes with a price nobody warned them about.

Then Antonio meets Brittany.

She introduces him to another Chicago, the history beneath the streets, the Great Migration, Bronzeville, Black businesses, the blues, the trains, the stories hidden inside the neighborhoods he thought he knew. For the first time, Antonio begins imagining a future bigger than the one people expect him to inherit.

But the past isn't finished with his family.

Old grudges are resurfacing.

Danger is getting closer.

And somebody knows more about Antonio's brother than Antonio ever did.

When Antonio finally gets the shoes he's spent the entire summer chasing, he thinks he's reached the finish line.

He hasn't.

Because the shoes were never really the prize.

SOLE PURPOSE is a powerful coming-of-age story about friendship, family, first love, ambition, and the dangerous cost of becoming who the world expects you to be.

And in a city that can teach a child how to dream as quickly as it can teach him how to survive, Antonio is about to discover the question that matters most:

What is anything worth if it costs you the person you were meant to become?