Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks
by Jason Reynolds
Intermediate, Middle School    Dlouhy/Atheneum    193 pp.
10/19    978-1-4814-3828-5    $17.99
e-book ed.  978-1-4814-3830-8    $10.99

Ten blocks. Ten stories. Lots of middle-school kids doing many different things after school. Jasmine and TJ walk home together, wondering what they’re made of—dust and water? boogers? Four friends hustle for change all day and maneuver their capital into buying an urgently needed treat for one of their moms. Ty sprints to check on Bryson, who stayed home to recover from getting jumped the day before. Fatima manages the unpredictable by writing lists of things that don’t change and keeping track of things that do. Gregory’s friends spruce him up and hype him up as they walk him over to Sandra’s house so he can finally tell her he likes her. And Canton, the son of the crossing guard who got injured by a school bus a year ago, sits at his mom’s intersection doing homework. Each short story is filled with the heart and humor for which Reynolds’s middle-grade and middle-school work (As Brave As You, rev. 7/16; the Track series) is known. The young characters cope with difficult problems, from stressed-out parents and aging grandparents to siblings they’ve lost to death or prison, but they are first and foremost ordinary, good kids. And all throughout their striving, surviving, laughing, and groundedness, they relate to one another and to readers in a way that captures the heart. Names, jokes, and details are cleverly and deeply woven between stories to show the interconnectedness of the characters’ world, while the individually distinct stories remind us that you never know what someone else is going through.

From the November/December 2019 Horn Book Magazine.