By Jason Reynolds
A Newbery Honor novel in verse set inside a single elevator ride, sixty seconds long, as a grieving boy carries a gun down to avenge his murdered brother and meets the ghosts along the way.
Will's older brother Shawn has just been shot and killed. Will knows the rules he grew up on: no crying, no snitching, and you take revenge. So he tucks Shawn's gun into his waistband and steps into the elevator to go find the person he's sure pulled the trigger. The elevator stops on every floor, and each time someone new gets on, a friend, an uncle, Will's own father, every one of them killed by a gun, every one carrying a piece of the story Will thought he knew. The whole book unfolds in the sixty seconds of that ride down, in spare, hammering verse. By the time the doors open on the lobby, Will has to decide what he's actually going to do, and the book stops before it tells you.
It's short, it's verse, and the pages are mostly white space, so it never asks for reading stamina, only attention. The whole thing moves in real time across a single minute, which is part of why it can pull in an older reader who has decided books aren't for them. And it takes something some students at this age know firsthand, gun violence and the pull of revenge, and treats it, and them, with real weight. Reynolds doesn't preach. He lets the ghosts ask the hard questions and leaves the ending open, which is exactly what gets a class arguing about it for a week. Newbery Honor, Printz Honor, Coretta Scott King Honor.