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A Study Guide for Jason Reynolds's "Long Way Down"
A Study Guide for Jason Reynolds's "Long Way Down"
A Study Guide for Jason Reynolds's "Long Way Down"
Ebook43 pages32 minutes

A Study Guide for Jason Reynolds's "Long Way Down"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Jason Reynolds's "Long Way Down", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 17, 2019
ISBN9780028671314
A Study Guide for Jason Reynolds's "Long Way Down"

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    Book preview

    A Study Guide for Jason Reynolds's "Long Way Down" - Gale

    13

    Long Way Down

    Jason Reynolds

    2017

    Introduction

    Long Way Down is a young-adult novel in verse by Jason Reynolds, published in 2017. The novel is structured as a series of poems, almost always one to each page and a few consisting of only a single line or even a single word. The story concerns Will Holloman, a fifteen-year-old boy whose beloved older brother, Shawn, has been shot and killed. The norms of his community dictate vengeance, and the bulk of the novel follows Will, armed with his brother's gun, on an elevator ride to the ground floor of his apartment building to kill the presumed murderer. At various stops on the sixty-seven-second ride down, the ghosts of other people from Will's past who have been killed enter the elevator to challenge his determination. The novel has won several awards, including a Newbery Medal and a Coretta Scott King Award. It shares themes of many of Reynolds's other books, which frequently deal with young adults coping with violence, death, and grief. Reynolds, who is African American, has stated that it is his intention to write books that accurately reflect the experiences of black youth in America but which are universal enough to engage readers of any age or ethnic background.

    Author Biography

    Reynolds was born on December 6, 1983, in Washington, DC, and grew up in the DC suburb of Oxon Hill, Maryland. His mother, Isabel, was a special education teacher at Barnaby Manor Elementary School in Oxon Hill, where her son was a student. Back then, Reynolds said in a 2017 interview on CBS News, the teachers said two things: one, that I was one of the most disorganized kids that they'd ever seen…. And two, that I didn't work to my full potential.

    Media Adaptations

    Long Way Down was released as an audiobook by Simon & Schuster Audio simultaneously with the book's publication. It is narrated by the author and has a running time of one hour and forty-three minutes.

    Reynolds has stated that he did not read a book until he was seventeen years old because Moby-Dick and similar books were too removed from his personal experience. When he was nine years old, however, the lyrics of the album Black Reign, by Queen Latifah, and work by other hip-hop artists, inspired him to write poetry; although his academic performance was consistently poor, he continued writing. He graduated from high school in 2000 and began working at a bookstore specializing in African American literature, where he was exposed to Richard Wright's memoir Black Boy (1945); this, in turn, introduced him to

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