Punching the Air
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 YOTO CARNEGIE MEDAL
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 the Noughts & Crosses series and The Hate U Give.
One fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighbourhood escalates into tragedy. ‘Boys just being boys’ turns out to be true only when those boys are white.
Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal Shahid’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.
Reviews
‘Zoboi and Salaam have created nothing short of a masterwork of humanity, with lyrical arms big enough to cradle the oppressed, and metaphoric teeth sharp enough to chomp on the bitter bones of racism. This is more than a story. This is a necessary exploration of anger, and a radical reflection of love, which ultimately makes for an honest depiction of what it means to be young and Black in America.’ – Jason Reynolds, award-winning, bestselling author of Long Way Down
‘Punching the Air is the profound sound of humanity in verse. About a boy who uses his creative mind to overcome the creativity of racism. About a boy who uses the freedom of art to overcome his incarceration. About you. About me. Utterly indispensable.’ – Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Stamped and How to Be an Antiracist
‘In this beautifully rendered book, we are reminded again of how brilliant and precarious our Black Lives are and how art can ultimately heal us.’ – Jacqueline Woodson, award-winning, bestselling author of Brown Girl Dreaming
Praise for BLACK ENOUGH, edited by Ibi Zoboi
‘A powerful collection that opens the reader’s eyes to the breadth and diversity of contemporary experience in America’ – June Sarpong, author of Diversify
‘A breath of fresh air . . . nuanced and necessary.’ – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
‘The stories, all worth savoring, share a celebratory outlook on black teenagers fully and courageously embracing life.’ – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Praise for AMERICAN STREET by Ibi Zoboi
‘Self-assured, elegant and utterly captivating.’ – The New York Times
‘Fierce and beautiful.’ – Booklist (starred review)
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
There’s barely a word wasted in Punching the Air, the urgent 2020 novel from award-winning YA author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam. As a member of the Central Park Five—imprisoned for seven years for a crime he had nothing to do with—there can be no doubt that Salaam’s story directly influenced this one. Here, we’re introduced to Amal Shahid, a Black teenager who excels at art and poetry but who, after an altercation in his rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, is sent to a juvenile detention centre for something he didn’t do. A first-person, fictional account, Punching in the Air is told in lithe verse that makes every word vital, and renders Amal—and the emotions he goes through as he moves from school classroom to courtroom and then into a jail cell—powerfully real. This is a story of a criminal justice system determined to see a young boy as something he’s not, his only crime being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Punching the Air’s format may make this a swift read, but the messages at the heart of this timely, essential novel are impossible to skip over.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zoboi (Pride) and Salaam (one of the Exonerated Five) together craft a powerful indictment of institutional racism and mass incarceration through the imagined experience of Amal, a Black, Muslim 16-year-old facing imprisonment. Amal, a gifted artist and poet attending a prestigious fine arts high school, has his life turned upside down when a nighttime park confrontation leaves a white kid from the other side "of that invisible line/ we weren't supposed to cross" in a coma, and Amal and his four friends on the hook for assault and battery they did not commit. Using free verse, Zoboi and Salaam experiment with style, structure, and repetition to portray "old soul" Amal's struggle to hold on to his humanity through the chaotic, often dehumanizing experience of juvenile incarceration. From the trial onward, the authors liken the pervasive imprisonment of Black bodies to the history of chattel slavery in America ("and this door leads to a slave ship/ and maybe jail"), and describe how educational racism feeds Black students into the school-to-prison pipeline ("I failed the class/ she failed me"). Zoboi and Salaam deliver an unfiltered perspective of the anti-Blackness upholding the U.S. criminal justice system through the eyes of a wrongly convicted Black boy ("shaping me into/ the monster/ they wanted me to be"). Ages 14 up.
