Yet every act of revenge only leads to another, thus furthering the cycle of violence, and Long Way Down does a fantastic job of hammering this idea in. They are simple, as the blurb explains: No crying. This is linked to The Rules, which have been passed down for so long that Will can’t even name who came up with them in the first place - “The Rules have always ruled. An unbroken chain that “gets passed down” and “inherited” (p.27), it weighs down heavily on Will, who has been heavily affected by it and has to decide whether or not to further it himself. The cycle of violence is the strongest theme that Reynolds’ book explores. 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.įirst, we’re going to start off by breaking down the themes that I drew from Long Way Down. We’re doing this so that we can link the symbols back later. 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.

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?Īs 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. An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is 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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