This is a must-read and must-share in classrooms (7th & up), especially in those rooms where you have teens who are living Will's life with the rules he's been taught to life by. The type of impact that makes you question what you thought you knew and how life can be. Jason's skill at putting words together that grab your heart and head, bringing you into the lives of his characters, kids just trying their best to do what's right and live the way they've been taught, astounds me. I'm going to be talking about and sharing this book for a very long time. Jason Reynolds is masterful in the way he can use such sparse language in these free verse poems for such a powerful and emotional impact. A story that might never know an END…if WILL gets off that elevator. 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.Īnd 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 teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. 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. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans.

A long way down by jason reynolds