I wasn’t expecting to see poetry when I cracked open Long Way Down. I had heard great things about this novel, how it was a nominee for the National Book Award for Fiction, how it was an important piece of African-American literature. But… poetry? Was there some kind of mistake? I don’t usually do narrative verse, and this is the first book of its type to find its way to my shelf. It took five pages to make me a believer.

Long Way Down follows Will, a 15-year old inner-city kid. His older brother, Shawn, was brutally and senselessly gunned down right in front of him, and to rectify that, Will must follow The Rules: don’t cry. Don’t snitch. Get revenge. Will finds his late brother’s gun I the bedroom they shared and sets out to exact his vengeance on the person he suspects is responsible for his brother’s murder, but in the elevator on the way to fulfill this dark deed, he is visited by a cast of characters touched by gun violence: the victims themselves, all of their deaths tied to The Rules, to Shawn, and to the gun in the waistband of Will’s jeans.

This was a finalist for the National Book Award, and that it didn’t win makes me wonder what book did (side note: Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward. It’s on my 2018 queue for sure). I tore through Long Way Down in an hour and absorbed the free-verse epic. Jason Reynolds crafted a hefty, fully-realized story that works on many levels. I grew up in a neighborhood similar to the one depicted here at a time when these unwritten rules were followed to the letter. I’ve lost more than a few childhood friends to senseless beef that ended in gunfire, and the portrayal of a grief-stricken teen and his horrible (yet very necessary) mission rang true.

Telling the story as a series of short poems was a stroke of genius. It lent a very animated feel to the tale; the action—and inaction—on the page flowed effortlessly and the sparseness of the words made every one of them of life-or-death importance. The story itself read like a ghetto version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with Will as Scrooge and the six people that get on the elevator acting as a Ghost of Gun Violence, Past, Present, and Yet To Come. It takes place over the course of maybe five minutes, but in that time, we see Will change from someone resolute in his decision to do what needed to be done, to someone who sees the cyclical trap he would step into and becomes increasingly unsure about it.

Long Way Down is a quick read that is shocking in its depth. It burrows into your mind and takes root there, leaving you to ponder its message for several weeks.

5 of 5 stars.

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