Book Report: Look Both Ways

13. Jason Reynolds, Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks (2019) (6/7/2020)

This is a book about middle schoolers, written for middle schoolers perhaps—but we all went through that awkward age of figuring life out, of growing into who we were to become, so it's a book that an adult, too, can find pleasure in. Very much so.

Look Both Ways, as the subtitle explains, consists of ten stories, each told from a different perspective or set of perspectives as the young subjects walk home from school one afternoon. A schoolbus falling from the sky appears ever so briefly in each tale, as a trope of magical realism that ties these varying experiences together. In one story in the middle of the book, a character asks, "How you gon' change the world?"; that phrase is also written large on the back cover. It's a good question, and the answer that I see the book providing is, through love and witness, generosity and caring. Because another thing that ties these stories together is just that: the students' own solidarity and love—for one another, for parents with cancer, for a grandfather with Alzheimer's, for a best friend; a janitor's crafting of a "broom dog" for a boy suffering from panic attacks; a boy turning his back on bullying; tender, humorous steps toward romantic love.

Jason Reynolds seems to be a phenom who has carved himself a secure place in YA fiction. His writing is masterful, able to provide a strong sense of individuals through very few strokes and to flip a story from one direction into another with ease. He is African American, and although the race of the children is rarely specified—and then only via physical description, such as a hair style or a comment about skin—I imagined all of them, students and teachers alike, to be people of color. Maybe, maybe not. In any case, race isn't the issue; the experiences that these kids have are experiences that any kid could have. There is plenty of happiness and laughter, and when a home situation is difficult it is because of illness or a parent who works too hard, not because of racism, poverty, or abuse. This is a decent neighborhood where everyone is striving to lead a decent life.

It's a little hard to find passages to quote, but here—this one works to give a sense of the mosaic of emotions that Reynolds manages to convey:

Ty tried to convince his parents Call of Duty was educational. That it was basically like interactive social studies class. That there was no better way to learn about that particular war then to jump right into it.
 "There is no way you can know war, son," Ty's mother scolded. "Not unless you've fought in one. And you haven't. You're talking about Nazis. That's a lot more than some video game."
 Ty understood that he didn't know the kind of war he was simulating in the game. That his controller wasn't a rifle and his raggedy family-reunion T-shirt wasn't a flak jacket. His headset wasn't a helmet, and the sounds in his ears were, in fact, just sounds in his ears. But Ty also knew that there was some kind of war he was in. Some kind of battle he did not know but couldn't make sense of. That the other sounds in his head were more than just sounds, that they made his heart do weird things, made his stomach tighten. Ty knew the anxiety of a kind of war. He knew the adrenaline and the confusion of it all.
 Because yesterday. Because yesterday. Because yesterday.
 Ty had been kissed. By a boy. Slim.
 At the water fountain after first period. PE.
 On his cheek.
 But close enough to his mouth to count.
 They were fighting over the water.
 We were fighting over the water, right?
 It was weird.
 He was surprised. But not mad. Which was more surprising.
 It was so weird.
 It wasn't that weird. 
 It was a little weird. But not a whole lot weird.
 It was seen. By someone no one saw see it.
 And that someone told everyone. Everyone.
 And by lunch, Slim—whose real name was Salem—had twisted the story, told everyone Ty kissed him. So, when Ty walked into the cafeteria, he walked into a minefield. A war zone. Everyone locked and loaded, firing at him.

The book ends with a quote from Garnette Cadogan's essay "Walking while Black": "A foot leaves, a foot lands, and our longing gives it momentum from rest to rest." The thought ends thus: "We long to look, to think, to talk, to get away. But more than anything else, we long to be free."

I also have Reynolds's book in verse Long Way Down. I won't read it right away, but I do look forward to reading it before too long. I might become a fan.

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I last posted five days ago, when the Monterey County stats stood at 571 confirmed cases of Covid-19, 65 hospitalizations, and 10 deaths. Today's stats are 732, 74, and 10. The numbers keep going up—though thankfully, the deaths have not been rising. And that is true of California overall as well. This is what the graph looks like as of today, for the state:

We will not be out of the woods for months. I think that's pretty certain.