Punching the Air

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But when she teamed up with Yusef Salaam, one of the now-exonerated Central Park Five, I knew this book was going to be something special. The book discusses the many systems put in place by white Americans that disadvantage and discriminate against Black people. Home has a base, a rhythm, a groove, so it was always easier to rhyme to it, to sing to it, to dance to it, to draw to it, to paint to it. Ibi Zoboi does a fantastic job using stylistic devices to her advantage; her simple and poignant diction never failed to draw me in.

Punching the Air is a novel written in verse about 16 year old Amal, who is convicted of a crime he did not commit because he is black. Sixteen-year-old African American Amal Shahid narrates Punching the Air in verse; his words and paintings illuminate each page with the story of his wrongful incarceration. It presented well the angst, the confusion, the loneliness, the beliefs of the narrator but I didn't get that connected to the character. One day, he finds himself in a wrong-place-wrong-time altercation, one that would have been excused as “boys being boys” if it weren’t for the colour of his skin. they see it like that, we haven't been standing a chance and it's so tiring to fight and fight, because it's feels like punching the air but if we don't fight then we let them win and it's already time we win, we become the kings and queens of this world whom try to erase us.For example, they would only study white artists, which Amal got in trouble for when pointing the discrepancy out in class. While this is not the story about Yusef Salaam, a prison abolitionist and one of the Exonerated Five, it does draw on some things that he experienced when he was wrongfully imprisoned.

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting for Jeremy Mathis to wake up from his coma so that he can give a statement to prove Amal should not be in jail. It was clear to him in his art school that some classes were made for the white students and that Black students were not expected to thrive there in the same way.The book starts just before the jury sentences Amal, who is 16 at the time, to several years of prison for allegedly attacking a (white) boy and beating him into a coma. We have here a child that’s bearing the burden that comes with having a skin colour he had no choice in choosing. Punching The Air is about the institutional racism and systematic oppression that kids of colors experience in school, trials, and even once they reach jail or prison.

However, Amal leaves his first session of the class because he does not like the activity, one that makes them reflect on their mistakes and misgivings. I really wish publication could be moved up for this book because, while I'm certain it's story will be no less relevant in September, it very much complements the discussions happening right now. Punching the Air was a powerful novel in verse about a Black Muslim boy who was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. In the past, I've felt like verse authors have just rearranged fragments of text on the page to be quirky but, with authors like Elizabeth Acevedo and Ibi Zoboi, that seems to be changing. 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.I was a bit worried when I saw that the entire book was told in verses because it can be either a hit or miss for me.

The novel becomes all the more poignant when you consider that one of the authors- Yusef Salaam- was himself wrongfully convicted of a violent crime as a teenager and served six years in prison before being exonerated. In a positive review for Booklist, Terry Hong complimented the audiobook narrator, Ethan Herrise, for how he "embodies the novel in verse" with "careful, thoughtful precision. His mother also does not get to see the mural because she is waiting at the hospital: Jeremy Mathis has finally awakened from his coma, and she wants to be there for his statement.Can you be less cranky and not make your classes feel like someone else has punished you to do your job and in turn shove that hatred towards your students? The narrative in this novel had a moment-to-moment feeling that was pretty tension ridden and I read much of it with that sense of doom and despair conveyed by Amal’s feelings. It is a book about race and the way the judicial system and prison system in America disproportionately fails and oppresses black people.