At a Glance
Fifteen-year-old Will watched his older brother Shawn get shot the night before. Now Will has Shawn's gun in his waistband and is riding the elevator down from the seventh floor of his apartment building to avenge the murder. The ride takes sixty seconds. Seven floors. Five ghosts of people killed by the same cycle of violence — each one with something to say before Will reaches the lobby and pulls the trigger.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Long Way Down was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Printz Award, and the Carnegie Medal simultaneously — a trifecta essentially without precedent for a debut verse novel for young adults. It introduced a generation of reluctant readers to the possibilities of verse fiction while forcing a national conversation about gun violence, retaliatory cycles, and who literature is written for. It has been adopted in schools across America as both a literature text and an entry point for discussions about community violence that no other format had been able to open.
Diction Profile
Conversational — Will's voice is plain, direct, neighborhood-specific; elevated only through line breaks, not vocabulary
Low to moderate