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Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People?s Literature
Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
November 2017
On Sale: October 24, 2017
320 pages
ISBN: 1481438255
EAN: 9781481438254
Kindle: B06ZZLYTK9
Hardcover / e-Book
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Young Adult Suspense
An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller Jason Reynoldsβs fiercely stunning novel that takes place in sixty potent secondsβthe time it takes a kid to decide whether or not heβs 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. Thatβs 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. Thatβs where Willβs now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brotherβs gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who heβs 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 thatβs when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawnβs gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didnβt know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buckβs in the elevator? Just as Willβs trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buckβs cigarette. Will doesnβt 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 ENDβ¦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.
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