Waiting on Wednesday: Walk it Down by Ashley Hope Perez

 

Image: Penguin Random House

Walk It Down by Ashley Hope Perez. 416 p. Dutton Books for Young Readers/ Penguin Young Readers, March 9, 2027. 9780399538605.

I was lucky enough to attend the Tri-State Book Buzz last week, where a slew of publishers had ten minutes each to talk about their favorite upcoming titles. It was both exhilarating and exhausting to hear about all these books! I have a ton of fodder for W-o-W posts!

I'll start with Walk It Down by Ashley Hope Perez. I had the honor of reading her debut, What Can't Wait back in 2011, and was totally gutted by Out of Darkness. This title is a companion to Out of Darkness, and I can't wait to read it. Here's the publisher blurb:

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 Grant 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.

Happy reading!