Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam

International Book Tour

Organized by Karina @ Afire Pages

About the Book

Title: Punching the Air

Author: Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam

Publisher: Balzer+Bray

Publishing Date: Sept. 1st 2020

Pages: 400

Age Category & Genre: Young Adult Contemporary, Fiction, Poetry

Purchase links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Book Depository

Synopsis:

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.

I was only 2 years old when the members of the Exonerated Five were released from prison, so I missed most of the details of these events. In fact, I did not even hear about this case until they were suing NY in 2014. When I heard about it I thought it was awful, but I didn’t focus on it too much. The next time I heard about the case was when it was referenced because of Trump’s article about the falsely accused boys in 1989 and continued horrible and defamatory statements about them nearly to this day. By this point, I was nearing graduation and more worried about politics in general, so I decided to read up about the situation myself. What I read shocked me to my core and saddened me. It was so easy for the entire country to gang up on these kids, and turn them from simple teenagers into monsters through the media. How many times has this been done before? It may not have been on this large of a scale, but how many small towns have sent black kids to prison for something they simply didn’t do, just because the community believed the lie and wanted “justice”? How many kids have been killed over something akin to gossiping and rumors? These were the thoughts swirling through my 16-year-old mind as I learned more about this case, and heard from my parents how awful it was to see this unfold in real-time. Now, at 20 years old, a fictional book has been based on the experiences of these men, and I knew I had to read it.

Amal was just a kid who was looking forward to attending an art program, even though he had been struggling with a few of his art teachers at his art school. Then he happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and is accused of trying to murder a white kid during a fight. Amal knows that the kid was not that injured when he last saw him, but people saw him in the fight and assumed that he was the culprit. Doesn’t help that a few of his teachers had it out for him and claimed he had problems. Now, his life has been ruined, he’s been sent to juvie, and he can’t see a way out.

It was horrifying to see how easily Amal’s entire life was ruined. Even if he had gotten a not-guilty verdict, where would he have gone back to? There still would have been people who would think he was guilty, even if another suspect had come into play. Just because they tried to frame him in this way, they had ruined everything for him. What’s worse is that Amal spends most of the book in limbo. The boy who had been attacked was in a coma, and there was a possibility that he would wake up. He was basically Amal’s only chance at going free once he was convicted, but he lay in a hospital unconscious for the entirety of the novel. Amal was on his own.

I am not Muslim, but as a person who was raised religiously I could understand the struggle that Amal went through in this novel. He believed in the peace that his beliefs brought him, and his family continued to pray throughout this entire situation. Yet, he struggled while he was in prison, as it was not a healthy situation for any young teen to be in. He struggled within himself so much, and that was reflected in the verse of this novel.

The fact that this novel was written in poem/verse form made the story just that much more powerful. This book shows the pain Amal goes through, interspersed with memories from his past and thoughts of his future. This really drew me into him as a character and made me want to follow him from the beginning to the end of his story. I enjoyed every minute that I read this story, even if it was a difficult one to read, simply because I got to spend time with Amal.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a hard-hitting poetry/verse novel about a boy trying to mentally cope with being abused by the corrupt “justice” system.

I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.

Overall Rating: 5 out of 5 books.

About the Authors

Ibi Zoboi was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and holds an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her novel American Street was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Pride and My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, a New York Times bestseller, and Punching the Air with co-author and Exonerated Five member, Yusef Salaam. She is the editor of the anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America. Raised in New York City, she now lives in New Jersey with her husband and their three children.

Dr. Yusef Salaam was just fifteen years old when his life was upended after being wrongly convicted with four other boys in the “Central Park jogger” case. In 2002, after the young men spent years of their lives behind bars, their sentences were overturned. Now known as the Exonerated Five, their story has been documented in the award-winning film The Central Park Five by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon and in Ava DuVernay’s highly acclaimed series When They See Us. Yusef is now a poet, activist, and inspirational speaker. He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from President Barack Obama, among other honors. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Sanovia, and their children. You can find him online at http://www.yusefspeaks.com.