Long Way Down

Fifteen-year-old Will has a gun tucked into the back of his jeans. It belonged to his brother Shawn, who has just been murdered. Will knows the rules he has grown up with: no crying, no snitching, and when a loved one is killed, revenge follows. He steps onto the elevator on the seventh floor, sure of who he is going after.

The elevator stops at the sixth floor, and Buck gets on. Buck is the one who handed Shawn the gun in the first place. He tells Will to check the chamber, and Will sees that a bullet is missing. Only Shawn could have fired it. There is one more problem: Buck is dead, and he is standing in the elevator smoking.

At the fifth floor a teenage girl gets in. Will has not seen her since they were eight, when stray bullets crossed a playground and he tried to shield her. She wants to know what happens if he misses. At every floor another person tied to Shawn arrives, each with a piece of a larger story than the one Will thinks he knows.

The whole book is one elevator ride, about sixty seconds long, told in short, hard lines of verse. It reads fast and tense, and it deals directly with gun violence among teenagers. The question hanging over every page is whether Will gets off that elevator with the gun still in his waistband.