Title: Long Way Down: The Graphic Novel
Author: Jason Reynolds
Illustrator: Danica Novgorodoff
Rating: ✨✨✨✨✨
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Release Date: October 13, 2020
Genre: Graphic Novels/ Teen Fiction
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Many thanks to HearOurVoices, and Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books for my advanced copy of this book in exchange for an impartial review and a spot on this tour. I generally don’t read a lot of graphic novels, but the premise of this one really intrigued me, and I’m glad I read it!
Here are 15 thoughts I had while reading!
- The illustrations are so good!
- I love me some brotherly love.
- The rules really are for the broken.
- Don’t do this, baby.
- Not another dead person in this elevator?!
- She wasn’t even in a gang and she was so young. My heart. 💔😢
- It’s really a vicious cycle of death when it comes to gang killings.
- His mom is really going through it.
- Boy, why are you still in an elevator with dead people?
- The rules are so full of toxic masculinity.
- So that’s where that bullet went.
- I knew he was gonna show up!
- I hope he’s okay after all of this.
- There, baby, just cry.
- That was so beautiful.
Here are my favorite quotes:
✨
but if the blood
inside you is on the inside
of someone else,
you never want to
see it on the outside of
them.
✨
The Rules weren’t meant to be broken.
They were meant for the broken
to follow
✨
The invention of The Rules
ain’t come from my brother,
his friends, my dad, my uncle,
the guys outside, the hustlers and shooters,
and definitely not from
me.
✨
Never smoked
or nothing like that.
Don’t know high life.
Don’t know bad trips.
✨
How do you small-talk your father
when “dad” is a language so foreign
that whenever you try to say it,
it feels like you got a
a third lip
and a second tongue?
✨
I couldn’t just come home
and be a daddy and a husband
when I couldn’t be a brother
no more.
Book Info:
Jason Reynolds’s Newbery Honor, Printz Honor, and Coretta Scott King Honor–winning, #1 New York Times bestselling novel Long Way Down is now a gripping, galvanizing graphic novel, with haunting artwork by Danica Novgorodoff.
Will’s older brother, Shawn, has been shot.
Dead.
Will feels a sadness so great, he can’t explain it. But in his neighborhood, there are THE RULES:
No. 1: Crying.
Don’t.
No matter what.
No. 2: Snitching
Don’t.
No matter what.
No. 3: Revenge
Do.
No matter what.
But bullets miss. You can get the wrong guy. And there’s always someone else who knows to follow the rules…
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Author Info:
Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, a two-time National Book Award finalist, a Kirkus Award winner, a two-time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. Reynolds is also the 2020–2021 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. His many books include When I Was the Greatest, The Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely), As Brave as You, For Every One, the Track series (Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu), Look Both Ways, and Long Way Down, which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor. He lives in Washington, DC. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.
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Illustrator Info:
Danica Novgorodoff is an artist, writer, graphic designer, and horse wrangler from Louisville, Kentucky, currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Her books include A Late Freeze; Slow Storm; Refresh, Refresh (included in Best American Comics 2011); and The Undertaking of Lily Chen. Her art and writing have been published in Best American Comics, Artforum, Esquire, VQR, Slate, Orion, Seneca Review, Ecotone Journal, and many others. She was awarded a 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Literature, and was named Sarabande Books’ 2016 writer in residence. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, VCCA, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. Visit her online at DanicaNovgorodoff.com.
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