Long Way Down - Year 9 Boys' Reading Club

Today was our second meeting with our Year 9 Boys book club as we discuss Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds.

30 boys in Year 9 and six members of the Senior Leadership Team and myself meet in the Library before school to discuss the novel, we will be doing so in five different Library Lessons.

Today the boys came in talking excitedly about the book which was a great surprise for me.

I sat down with my group and said, “well, what did we think of the first 65 pages?” I had asked them to read to page 65 for the first week.

My group had already finished the novel, reading all 300-plus pages in the week, as did the majority of the other boys.

“It’s the best book I’ve ever read without a doubt,” one boy said, “and I don’t read.”

“What do you mean you don’t read?” I asked.

“I never read books, I don’t like reading but this book is different.”

“What makes it different?”

“The whole style, I just can’t explain it, but it’s the best book ever.”

Another boy said, “It’s written in little poems that aren’t really poems, that’s why I liked it. That’s the way someone’s real brain works.”

I asked him to explain this, he said “Will has all of these random thoughts, his brain gets scattered sometimes. In real life, even though you might be going through something bad, your brain still goes all over the place. That’s why I think this book is so realistic.”

Another boy in my group said “I normally wouldn’t pick up a book like this because I like books like Ready Player One or the Hunger Games but once I worked out how good it was, I couldn’t stop. I read it in one day.”

There was also a ton of discussion around the illustrations. “The illustrations were real – they looked like sketches” one boy said. “They looked like they’d been torn out from somewhere else and stuck in. They were so good, they reflect the whole mood of the book.”

The boys kept going back to the style, one boy summed it up by saying “The way it’s written comes across as broken and messy but that’s how people think. My brain is going all the time with all these thoughts constantly in my head and I felt like he writes like that. It’s like he writes how I’m thinking.”

We also read a few specific passages that concentrated on the gun and the Rules that Will follows and about violence in America and specifically the UK.

It was really amazing to see these boys so excited about the book. I really hope we can talk to Jason at some point in the near future!