LOOK BOTH WAYS

Perfect gift for a 12 year old avid reader.

I bought it for my 9 year old son, who has really enjoyed it! Jason Reynolds has a great gift of reaching out to the youth.

Please think carefully before buying this book for your children. It is a difficult read even for a resilient adult! Each chapter faces new traumas. While it is a reality for sadly a lot of children, this book is also aimed at children, who are already likely struggling to articulate what they are going through. Books like this don’t always help articulate, they may in fact be re-traumatising.

I really dont like this book . I have read three " Blocks ( chapters ) " . The characters are violent/victims of violence , traumatised, messed up , hustlers etc..... Cant children be children at least for a while . Do I want my 9 yo reading "snitches get stitches or sometimes ditches" . No. I do not. I appreciate authors make up worlds and maybe this world has some basis in reality for some but it is not a nice world to visit. Lastly, language. Stream of consiousness/jive was great when I was a teenager reading On the Road . A bit tricky when as a white middle class parent I am reading to my kids and keep "auto correcting" the protaganists grammar. Donny Hathaway . Legend. This book not so much .

I had a lump in my throat a couple of times. And laughed at others.The thread linking these stories is subtly done. One school, home time, all these children are heading home, some alone, some in groups, some have a plan, others are chatting and wandering.Though it's set in a time and place - a city block-system somewhere in America, ethnically diverse neighbourhood, these are regular kids. Talking about bogies, getting crushes, worried about bullies and dogs, some with family concerns.We don't get a chance to get to know anyone in depth, which is one thing I always find frustrating about short stories, but if I try to imagine this more as snapshots getting a feel for the school, environment and a cross-section of local characters, it works. I liked seeing the same characters pop up in each other's stories as well, though I couldn't always remember who was who.Some definitely hit home, the story of a group collecting pennies did give my lip a wobble.These kids are still young, not yet the adolescents who boast and brag and flirt and flight. Almost past the 'tween' stage of naivety, games of imagination and caring about the world of childhood.I liked it. Some stories I'd love to see extended into full novels of their own though.For ages 9-13.

Brilliantly written stories that link so subtly. I had no idea how each one would go, I paarticularly loved the first one with the ice creams. So glad to finally getting round to reading this, I only wish I had read it sooner.

To me, I find it very hard to find any faults in Jason Reynolds books. He is an amazing writer, but more than that, he is an artist. He weaves a story using the most simplistic terms, but intertwines the most powerful messages throughout.This book was no different. Look Both Ways is an anthology of 10 stories told in ten blocks starring different kids, who all know each other in some way, or go to the same school. Their stories are sometimes intertwined, but other times not. They may all seem like such ordinary stories, that maybe, Reynolds should have talked about more serious struggles, but no, what I loved about this book is the fact that it takes ordinary kids with ordinary lives and yet it stills manages to highlight how different or challenging their lives are. That somehow, being a black kid walking home from school, is not the same journey and not the same experience that any other kid would have walking home from school. It's powerful in its own way. And I respect that 100%.That being said, 3 stars, you ask? Well, that's the thing with anthologies. You win some, lose some. And for me, some stories were way more interesting than others, that I couldn't give it a higher rating.

This was such a great premise for a book and makes this one easy to pick up, rwad a story and put back down again. I love that these stories are not too long but also the fact that they are all linked because of their location. They don;t necessarily follow on from one another but you might spy a character from one story or an event from another story cropping up more than once.I could definitely recognise a lot of the characters in this book in children that I used to teach and I could picture the neighborhood very clearly so if you are an adult reading this book, fear not there is plenty for you here. So many of these stories managed to fit in so much character development in such a short space and also so much intrigue. I was definitely left wanting more from a few of the stories and hope that this setting might come up again in a future Jason Reynolds novel.I think my favourite stories were making jokes and lotioning up and you could definitely see Jason Reynolds poetry coming through in all ten of these stories. I really enjoyed this one, it would make and excellent gift or and excellent addition to your classroom.