Jason Reynold’s New Book “All American Boys” Review Coming Soon!

Jason is consciously committed to writing books that show “a broadly positive” yetauthentic “portrayal of black American men.” This is a priority not as prevalent many of today’s adolescent and YA writers, for although they are not avoiding a positive portrayal of the

black American male, their focus falls within other areas and deals with other issues that are just a vibrantly needed for our youth (such as  David Levithan, Cassandra Clare, and Hannah Moskowitz who consistently gives voice to the marginalization issues facing LGBTQ youth).

Jason Reynolds, whose first book “When I was the Greatest,” is the Coretta Scott King Honor awardee for 2015 and has Top Ten placement in several ALA connected and independent book lists for adolescent and young adult readers.   This book presents a view of

the black American urban male in a variety of spaces:  as a young adolescent in a single-parent working class household, as the friend of a neighbor whose need to identify with street cred is more important than

family/friend loyalty/brotherhood, as a young adolescent boy with Tourette’s syndrome who simply wants to be accepted by others for who he is, and as an estranged father in a lived world of homelessness yet capable of displaying a strength of character seldom seen in today’s media drenched videoed expressions of the urban black American male.

His second book, “The Boy in the Black Suit,” portrays the path a young boy travels to handle the death of his mother from cancer, and his third book coming out September 30 “All American Boy” has echoes of Kekla Magoon’s “How it Went Down,” due to the circumstances surrounding the death of a young urban black male and the way the book is organized to show all the points of view involved. Jason also has an autobiography out that he co-wrote with his college room-mate and Jason Griffin called “My Name is Jason. Mine Too. Our Story Our Way.”