By Jason Reynolds
Two Brooklyn brothers get sent to grandparents they barely know in rural Virginia for a summer month, where eleven-year-old Genie discovers Grandpop has been blind for years and starts to rebuild his whole idea of what brave means.
Genie is eleven, and he keeps a notebook of questions, because he has hundreds and nobody ever answers them straight. He and his older brother Ernie get driven from Brooklyn down to their grandparents' place in the Virginia woods for four weeks, while their parents fly to Jamaica to try to save their marriage. No internet. A house with a hole in the floor. Birds in cages in the sunroom that Grandpop sets loose at night. And on the first evening Genie figures out something nobody bothered to tell him: Grandpop is blind, from glaucoma, and has been for years. Genie also snaps the wheel off a model truck that belonged to Uncle Wood — the uncle killed in Desert Storm, the uncle no one mentions, the reason Genie's dad hasn't spoken to his own father in years. Then Ernie turns fourteen, and in this family fourteen means learning to shoot Grandpop's revolver. Ernie doesn't want to. Everyone leans on him until he does.
It's a book about what brave means, and it never once hands your child the answer. Genie starts out sure that brave is Grandpop the old sharpshooter, or Uncle Wood the soldier, or his big brother pulling a trigger. Then he watches a grown man be too scared to leave his own porch, watches that same brother say no in front of everyone, and has to build the whole idea over from the ground up. Reynolds makes Genie so funny and so restlessly curious that the reading stays easy even while the thinking gets hard, and the two tend to arrive together, mid-laugh. Children who ask a hundred questions a day will recognize him on the first page.