Fifteen-year-old Will Holloman's older brother Shawn has been shot dead. Will has grown up with three rules: do not cry, do not snitch, and if someone you love is killed, find the killer and kill him. He takes Shawn's gun from a dresser drawer and rides the elevator down from his eighth-floor apartment, intending revenge. The ride lasts about a minute, and at floor after floor a dead person steps in — a friend shot as a child, Shawn's mentor, an uncle, his father, and others — each of them killed in the same chain of retaliation Will is about to extend, and each with a piece of the story Will did not know. Told entirely in short, fierce verse, the novel leaves Will at the lobby door, and the reader with his unanswered choice.
Author: Jason Reynolds · Original publisher: Atheneum / Caitlyn Dlouhy Books (New York), 2017
