Walk It Down

From Michael L. Printz honoree Ashley Hope Prez 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 corna common, terrifying, and frequently lethal agricultural accident. Abel and Jonathanboth 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 Adams 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.