Book Review: Look Both Ways by Jason Reynolds (2019)

In this collection of short stories, Jason Reynolds tells ten tales, each one featuring the after-school life of a student at an urban middle school. The stories explore such common middle school themes as best friendship, first love, family struggles, sexual identity (including two boys kissing), and bullying.

Jason Reynolds is an extremely talented writer, and I gave this book four stars based almost exclusively on the quality of the writing within each story. As in his Track series (Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu), Reynolds creates a group of completely believable and endearing characters and manages to bring each of them fully to life despite being confined to the length of a short story for each one. I didn't necessarily love all of the subject matter (there is so much dialogue about boogers in the first story that I almost abandoned the book), but I can't deny that Reynolds has a strong talent for voice and character development.

I started out reading a digital ARC of this book, but I took so long to get to it, that the book was published right after I started it, so then I listened to part of the audiobook, which was read by 10 different narrators, including Reynolds himself. This was a great way to get immersed in the world of these kids' school and neighborhood and hearing the way the characters were intended to sound made me enjoy the book that much more. I still would have liked a stronger connection between the individual stories, and some of the topics covered I could have done without, but a better-written middle grade book from 2019 would be difficult to find.