Walk It Down

From Michael L. Printz honoree Ashley Hope Pérez comes a novel in verse about grief, masculinity, intergenerational trauma, and the hope of redemption. A companion to the critically acclaimed novel Out of Darkness.

Adam, his brother Abel, and their friends Jonathan and Wyatt are working in a grain silo when a minor fall leads to three of them being “engulfed” in the corn—a common, terrifying, and frequently lethal agricultural accident. Abel and Jonathan both die, and Adam barely survives.

Adam may have escaped the silo, but grief is crushing him. As he struggles to move on from the tragedy, he is forced to confront old wounds from the death of his baby sister years ago.

Paralleling Adam’s narrative is that of his father, a long-haul truck driver who is grappling with the weight of his own lineage and the stifling demands of Christian masculinity. As their threads wind closer together, father and son must fight to break a generations-long cycle of trauma and denial if they have any hope of learning to breathe again.