Reflect on the significance of the protagonist’s name. Poets are known for using language intentionally and with precision, often choosing words with connotative and denotative meaning. Unlike a traditional prose novel, Long Way Down is written in verse. Using details revealed in the text, create a character sketch or character collage of the book’s protagonist.Ģ. But in the elevator on the way down to meet Riggs, Will encounters family and friends who died playing by the rules, and now Will has to decide what he is going to do when the elevator reaches its final stop.ġ. Even if Will has never used a gun-never even held a gun before-rules are rules. He knows where Shawn keeps his gun, and he thinks he knows who the shooter is: a member of a rival gang named Riggs. When his older brother, Shawn, is shot and killed while walking home from the store, Will knows he is expected to follow the final rule and avenge his brother’s death. Will has known about the rules ever since his childhood friend was killed on the playground, and he’s followed the first two: no crying, and no snitching. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds. A story that might never know an END…if WILL gets off that elevator. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES.Īnd so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s LiteratureĪn ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller Jason Reynolds’s fiercely stunning novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds-the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother.
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