ARC REVIEW / Punching The Air By Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

 

Punching The Air By Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam Review

About:

From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. Perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds, Walter Dean Myers, and Elizabeth Acevedo. 

The story that I thought

was my life

didn’t start on the day

I was born 

Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he’s seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. “Boys just being boys” turns out to be true only when those boys are white. 

The story that I think

will be my life 

starts today

Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal’s bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it? 

With spellbinding lyricism, award-winning author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam tell a moving and deeply profound story about how one boy is able to maintain his humanity and fight for the truth, in a system designed to strip him of both.

Review:

Within these trying times, literature is now more important than ever to illustrate the lives of those marginalized by the past. In this case, it's a young black boy growing up in a system put in place to keep him in "his place." Told in poetry form, we are guided into the story of a young boy named Amal wrongfully jailed. I loved how each piece of poetry can be read like a full novel, meaning that each page was filled with immense imagery that is painful. Imagery that is real for so many people that are wrongfully convicted. In the Black Lives Matter movement, it's immensely important to have books like this, to capture the structured laws in place to keep black boys like Amal behind bars. I cannot highly recommend this book enough.