Long Way Down
Jason Reynolds's Long Way Down is a slim, electrifying novel in verse that takes place over the sixty seconds of a single elevator ride. Fifteen year old Will Holloman has watched his older brother Shawn shot dead the night before, and the unwritten Rules of his Brooklyn neighborhood require that Will avenge him. He tucks Shawn's gun into his waistband and steps onto the elevator on the eighth floor, intending to ride down to the lobby and find the man he believes pulled the trigger. On every floor between L and eight, the elevator stops to admit a different ghost, the lost men of Will's life and his family's history, each of whom has something to say about what loyalty and revenge actually cost. Reynolds writes in spare, propulsive verse that compresses an entire generational story of Black masculinity and gun violence into about three hundred lines, and the result has won the Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King Award.
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Will's older brother is shot dead. The next morning Will steps onto the elevator with his brother's gun, planning to follow the rules that have run his neighborhood. At each floor, someone he knew gets on. The whole novel is sixty seconds.
Yes. Long Way Down is written in verse, with poems forming the structure of the elevator ride at the heart of the story. Jason Reynolds's free-verse format is widely studied in middle and high school classrooms.
Yes. Long Way Down won the Newbery Honor, Printz Honor, and Coretta Scott King Author Honor in 2018. It is a graphic-novel adaptation, illustrated by Danica Novgorodoff, was published in 2020.
Long Way Down was written by Jason Reynolds, published in 2017 by Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing.
Long Way Down is 208 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Long Way Down takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Long Way Down is a standalone novel by Jason Reynolds, not part of a series.
Long Way Down is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
