BOOK REVIEW: ALL AMERICAN BOYS BY JASON REYNOLDS & BRENDAN KIELY

“Had our hearts really become so numb that we needed dead bodies in order to feel the beat of compassion in our chests? Who am I if I need to be shocked back into my best self?”

You know how authors' blurbs on books are always like "this book was spell-binding, dazzling, sparkling with literary magic and exquisiteness!!! This is a MUST READ you guys!!!!"?* I'm here to tell you that All American Boys really is a must read. Make it a staple. Make it a YA classic. Books like these are what we should be building our foundations--YA and otherwise--on.

Reynolds and Kiely do a great job exploring a breadth of topics in this novel, highlighting aspects that I don't think are often highlighted when we talk about these issues. Of course they unravel the larger, overarching topics, like police brutality, questioning and dismantling internalized racism, what to do when a community is rattled by a blatant act of injustice. However, they also underscore the deeply intimate reverberations these acts can have on a person, like what it means to have a video of yourself being violated circulated across the media and played again and again and again.  Needless to say, these issues are not constrained to this book. They are part of people's lived realities, more so than I can ever imagine. 

As for Quinn and Rashad's voices, they read as extremely authentic to me, and I really felt for them and what they were struggling with. Personally, I think Rashad's perspective was a bit on the dry side, especially because he was in the hospital the whole time, and after a while it felt like I was reading different iterations of the same interactions. Quinn's chapters definitely drew me in a lot more.

So far, this review has been all praise, so why the 3 stars? Well, by far my biggest problem with All American Boys is that it felt like it needed to be more fleshed out. The fact that the whole story happens over the course of A SINGLE WEEK just further exacerbated this. That's too short a time period for such momentous character development to happen (how does one even begin to dismantle internalized racism in a week?). More importantly though, it's hard truly investing yourself in these characters when you've only known them in the context of what happened to Rashad. If we had known what Quinn's relationship with Paul was like before Paul did what he did to Rashad, then it would've given us so much more insight into Quinn's emotional conflict. Same thing with Spoony, Rashad's brother. All we know him as is this super passionate activist for black rights. That's great, but if you asked me to tell you anything else about him, I'd draw a blank. This goes for every single character, and I think that's the crux of my problem with this book: every character is cast in a specific role, which ultimately makes it hard to think of them as anything outside those roles. Lastly--and this wasn't that big of an issue but I wanted to mention it anyway--the writing meandered at times, which made a lot of the scenes feel like filler. I found this was especially pronounced in Rashad's chapters, largely because he was at the hospital for almost the whole book.

Overall, All American Boys is a great collaboration. Sure, I had my problems with it, but that doesn't make its message any less urgent. I know people throw around the statement "this book is important!!" all the time, and maybe because of that it loses some of its effect, but listen, THIS BOOK IS IMPORTANT. Read it. Listen to it. Learn from it. And don't let that learning experience end when you flip the last page. 

*(okay maybe this example is a little exaggerated)