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All American Boys by Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds

The novel All American Boys written by Jason Reynolds follows the story of Rashad, an African American boy who is in high school, from two different perspectives, Rashad’s perspective and his classmate Quinn. In the early stages of the book Rashad is a victim of police brutality outside a shop that he shops at often. The police officer, who falsely accuses him of shoplifting, uses a lot of unnecessary force to subdue Rashad even though he was not resisting at all. He is sent to the hospital and then after a few days, when he wakes up, he is treated for many injuries including a few broken ribs. Rashad’s family now faces a tough choice, they can either go public with the story or keep the story within the family and police department. The choice is made for him when one of his friends reports the problem to the news and the story is all over local and national news the next day. Now Rashad’s family needs to deal with the local and national news. Rashad also goes back to school to contradicting stories of the events that happened over 2 months ago. You can also hear the whole story unfold from Quinn’s perspective who has his own opinions on what happened…

Only after a few pages I could tell that this was going to be one of my favorite novels that I’ve ever read.  The story of Rashad is very compelling, and it gets you cheering for every one of his triumphs.  Jason Reynolds is very talented at showing how teenagers react to racial injustice and how they interact with each other and other people in the small community that surrounds them throughout the novel.  Reynolds has a way to make you fall in love with Rashad and has you feel everything that Rashad is feeling in the moment with his immense vocabulary and great descriptive words that describe the scenes around Rashad beautifully. Some of the scenes featured in this novel are gruesome and intense, but Reynolds and Kiely break up these scenes by setting the scene and showing us how each character is feeling and reacting in the moment. How Reynolds uses the alternate perspective to enhance the story is great.  He uses Quinn’s perspective to show what a normal high schooler looking in on the story thinks and acts when he crosses paths with Rashad. After the conclusion of the book, it lands in my top 5 books that I have ever read.

Reviewed by Jared G., Grade 10

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