Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Wow!  What a beautifully written story.  Long Way Down is an incredible story, told in verse, about a young man (just 15 years old) whose brother has just been murdered.  Will is planning on following the rules that have been passed down in his family, in his neighborhood for years.  Rule #1: No crying.  Rule #2: No snitching.  Rule #3: Get revenge.

Armed with his brothers gun, he takes the elevator down from the seventh floor with the plans to go and kill the man he is SURE killed his brother.  At each floor someone new steps on the elevator, someone who has passed away, someone who has a connection to Will.  Each tells their story, making Will have to decide if he is really going to do what he says he is going to do.

This is a novel that is super fast paced and one that, due to it being told in verse, you will read in a very short time.  But you will also be blown away by the way that Reynolds so beautifully puts his words to paper.  I really cannot say enough good things about this one!

From Amazon:

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature

An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller Jason Reynolds’s fiercely stunning novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother.

A cannon. A strap.
A piece. A biscuit.
A burner. A heater.
A chopper. A gat.
A hammer
A tool
for RULE

Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES.

And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if WILL gets off that elevator.

Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.