collected
Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Young Adult
About 6 h 45 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 14 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Sixteen-year-old Rashad Butler stops at a corner store for chips and ends up hospitalized after a white police officer mistakes him for a shoplifter and beats him. Quinn Collins, a white classmate, witnesses the assault, but the officer is his best friend's older brother, who has helped look after Quinn since his father died. As a recording circulates and their school and basketball team divide, Quinn must reckon with what acknowledging the violence means for his loyalties.
Alternating first-person chapters follow the boys through the same week. The voices are conversational and sometimes funny, but this YA contemporary novel deals directly with racism, graphic police brutality and the pressure to stay silent.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Established
Not really. The prose is direct, conversational and driven by dialogue, with alternating first-person chapters following the same week. The greater challenge is emotional: racism, police brutality and the pressure to stay silent are central to the story.
Rashad, who is hospitalized after a police officer beats him, and Quinn, a white classmate who witnesses the assault, alternate as narrators. Quinn’s connection to the officer makes acknowledging what happened a conflict of loyalties.
Strong violence and abuse are central, including graphic police brutality that leaves sixteen-year-old Rashad hospitalized. The novel deals directly with racism and the pressure to stay silent about the assault, and it also contains strong language.
No. The story is tense and unsettling, but the boys’ conversational voices are sometimes funny, and the tone also includes hope. Friendship, community and questions of justice sit alongside the violence and divisions at school.
336 pages in the Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books 2017 paperback edition.
Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books · 2017 · paperback. ISBN 9781481463348.
About 6 hours 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 336-page Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books edition. Dense books can take longer.
Jason Reynolds writes novels and poetry for young adult and middle grade readers, with particular attention to the voices of young people navigating pressure, grief, violence, and questions of belonging. He begins with character rather than a fixed age category, allowing the voice to determine the audience. That method gives his work its direct, conversational quality, while his background in poetry supports more compressed and lyrical forms. Long Way Down, a verse novel structured around a brief elevator ride, shows his ability to use formal constraint to examine inherited rules and cycles of violence. Elsewhere, Ghost places questions of discipline and self-command within a middle-school track story, while All American Boys uses alternating viewpoints to confront racism and police brutality. His range also includes Stamped, an adaptation of Ibram X. Kendi’s history of racist and antiracist ideas, and a Miles Morales novel for Marvel. Across genres, Reynolds centers minority characters as part of the contemporary world they inhabit, pairing social questions with close attention to individual speech, relationships, and choice.
Brendan Kiely writes young-adult novels that place social conflict inside the immediate choices and bodily experience of his characters. A former high-school teacher and creative-writing instructor, he begins each novel with a visual moment, following it into character and story rather than applying a fixed formula. His recurring subject is the way unexamined privilege hardens into entitlement and violence. In All American Boys, co-written with Jason Reynolds, alternating narrators set a Black teenager assaulted by police beside the white witness confronting loyalty and complicity. Kiely wrote the witness, Quinn. Tradition shifts that scrutiny to gender, consent, and a school that protects status, using divided reactions rather than a single argument. The Last True Love Story widens his range through music, romance, a road journey, and threatened memory.
Erika L. Sánchez
Literary Fiction · Young Adult · Literary fiction
Sherman Alexie
Literary Fiction · Young Adult · Literary fiction
