Loved visiting the characters in this book! Kekla Magoon writes the characters so that you feel as if they are your friends. Sadly once again there has been a shooting and the neighborhood is in turmoil. Once again there is conflict between the police and the community. Will the verdict truly be fair? Will our favorite characters accept the verdict or will they :Light It Up" as the title suggests. A fabulous read that will keep you thinking a long time after you turn the last page.

Although this is listed as a sequel to How It Went Down, I really feel like students could read this on it's own. I like that it's a new story in the same setting with repeat characters, but I like that the focus is on a new situation. Magoon's style and subject matter will appeal to reluctant readers.

This novel was an unexpected joy to read. Written as vignettes from multiple POV's, Magoon formulated a way to connect characters in this story. I don't know how she sis it but her writing was so clear and vivid that i honestly felt as the this was a situation I've seen before. Weird i'm not sure how to explain it but it felt like de ja vu. lol This book was amazing. I'll read anything this author puts out in the future.

Many thanks to Netgalley & Henry Holt and Co. for gifting me this copy. Look out for a more in-depth review on goodreads.

Kekla Magoon's latest, Light It Up, is a very hard read. Not talking complex language or advanced vocabulary, but subject matter. This book is told in vignettes from multiple viewpoints starting with a young teenage girl of color, unarmed, gunned down by a police officer.

Each of the viewpoints in the story has some kind of connection to the victim, the officer, or the Underhill neighborhood in which the shooting takes place. Magoon rotates through them, including transcripts of news reports and social media posts, to allow the reader to see the situation from multiple angles. Robb, the white college boy who thinks he's woke enough to understand his black friends; Zeke and Kimberly, who work with an organization called SCORE that is working to better conditions for minorities; Tina, one of the victim's friends who has also lost her older brother, a gang member, to violence; Brick, the leader of the 8-5 Knights, and the list goes on.

Magoon doesn't pull any punches in this book. It's a highly emotional read on multiple levels. But it's such an important read. Each voice is unique in their viewpoint, their experience, and their take on Shae Tatum. I would say this is a must-read book. As a white woman, I know I can never truly know what my non-Caucasian friends and students have to live with every day. But this book shines a spotlight on it. Again, a must-read book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

I have been excited to read this one, and it does not disappoint. The *many* perspectives help provide not only a more comprehensive approach to the main events but also offer insight into how these characters relate to each other and to an unexpected point: how Shae's murder is front and center at the start but later becomes background as the characters move forward...or at least move in some other direction.

As with any multi-perspective work, it is much easier to engage with some characters and story lines than with others. I found this to be especially relevant to those characters whose relationships change in pairs or clusters over the course of the novel (the three college kids, the romantic relationships, the father and son). While I enjoyed the various takes and interactions between characters, I also did struggle with how many perspectives are operating here. At the start, I had a hard time keeping track of everyone and think that this might be a challenge for those (like me) who are always reading for both our own enjoyment AND for potentially teachable works. I can imagine that dealing with the number of characters alone could prove a bit of a slog in a classroom setting, especially when not all characters feel fully fleshed out.

My favorite part of this work is how the plot structure matches a move from Shae's murder as the focal point to this being the backdrop against which characters evolve anyway. Shae's murder is - of course - omnipresent, but I really enjoyed watching the characters learn of the event, face it, and move on from it. I appreciate that the style of the work matches this movement in the motif. The characters begin to focus on what's next, how they relate to others, etc. as they gain some level of distance from the murder and subsequent fall out in their community. For me, this choice highlights a critical acknowledgment: that Shae's is not an unusual case but rather a string in an ongoing (and seemingly endless) series of related incidents. At once, this is a tragic message (will this ever end?!) and a moderately hopeful one (because the characters come to terms with life after this event and try to move forward).

This is unsurprisingly not an uplifting read, but it's a well constructed problem novel with a timely and responsibly handled theme and a number of engaging characters.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital ARC of this book!

This book is an incredibly powerful and thought-provoking story, told from multiple viewpoints, about how members of the community deal with the police killing of an unarmed 13-year-old Black girl.

Given the number of Black folx murdered by police in recent years, this story obviously felt very realistic. The way the author uses the voices of different characters (members of the community who knew the girl who was killed, interviews with professors, artists, folx who left the community, social media posts, etc.) really helped to move the plot along and invoke several emotional responses as I read. Learning more details about several of the characters’ pasts (and how they were all connected) made me feel invested in their stories and enabled me to feel like I was able to experience a bit of their world.

The viewpoints of the white characters in this story really helped give voice to how racism works both covertly and overtly in our society. Readers get to see how a well-meaning yet sheltered white college student (whose middle name clearly should’ve been “microaggressions” when we first meet him) begins to grow into a more knowledgable and empathetic person who actually decides to become an accomplice for POC. Readers also get to experience some of the disgustingly blatant racism POC experience, via social media posts and protestors who show up to the young girl’s funeral saying she got what she deserved.

Light It Up is a painful and realistic look at our society, that will hopefully challenge readers to have honest conversations about how to combat microaggressions, police brutality, and systemic racism - and promote dignity and humanity for all.

This is a timely book about a neighborhood where a 13 year old girl was shot and killed by a police officer. It is told from multiple points of view, including the street itself, which was especially interesting - everyone has their own perspective and it was good to see them presented. There are the perspectives of the people working at the community center, the daughter of the officer who did the shooting, college-age boys who may or may not have connections to the neighborhood.

This is not an easy subject, but it is reality and we need to be talking about it and not just rushing to defend or attack one side or the other. At the end of the day, there is injustice and it will not be corrected until it is addressed.

I think this book should be read by high school students and maybe middle school students in class, where it can be discussed and the darkness can be brought into the light.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Light It Up takes place in the same universe--on the same street, even--as How It Went Down. It's not really a sequel and can be read alone, but I wish I'd read HIWD more recently and remembered it better. Like HIWD, LIU is told in multiple voices and is about the death of an unarmed Black teen at the hands of a white man, this time a police officer. 13-year-old Shae Tatum was running with her headphones on. I'm not sure who the girl depicted on the cover is meant to be, but she's not how I picture Shae, Kimberly, Jennica... I'm curious about the cover (and title) because I feel like this book about a community's reaction to being provoked, and the cover figure looks (to me, of course) like she's spoiling for a fight. I feel like the one character in the book really looking for trouble is ignorant white college student, Robb, and he gets it. And gets out of it. Robb learns a lesson, but who knows if it will really change him?

It's just, I'd rather not go alone. Plus, what's the point of protesting to support your black friends if your black friends don't even show up?

There's some great commentary in dialogue between news anchors and their guests, like an activist trying to explain the difference between protest and hate speech.

Guest: No. Empirically. My existence makes no threat to the personhood and liberty of a white supremacist. His existence does make a threat to mine.

Tina, an on-the-spectrum kid, and if I remember right, sister of the murder victim from HIWD, is the Greek chorus:

On paper
white out means
all you see is white
black type covered up
erased.
It is usually exciting
a clean slate--
the whole point of white out is
to make room for more black

Magoon has some sharp imagery herself, like Robb taking cell phone photos, and the sound described as a "metallic little scissor-click." Robb is cutting his friends while documenting them. That's a powerful thought for institutional archivists, as well.

Special needs teacher Melody defines the stakes of protesting police violence:

We got nothing to lose. We gonna die anyway. Let it not be in a dark alley. Let it not go unseen. They coming for us. Let us meet them. Under the lights, in front of the cameras.

Revisiting that quotation, I understand a little better the "light it up" sentiment in the title, that it's about illuminating, rather than burning.

Light it Up, which I received through NetGalley and Henry Holt and Company, tells the story of what happens in a community after a thirteen-year-old, unarmed, African American girl is shot while running away from a police officer. Many, many voices are contained within this novel and each of them is unique. We hear from those who knew Shae personally and those who didn’t. All of these voices combine to show how interconnected we all are and how dangerous it can be when that is forgotten. They also communicate that each individual response is different, depending on identity and experience. There will never be one voice that can speak for all others, though those most connected to the experience should be heard loudest of all.

Magoon always does an extraordinary job of highlighting the differing views of her characters (see How it Went Down), but in Light it Up she goes even further to delineate how race, gender, class, and ability affect individual experiences. The power of this book comes from how the story encompasses each individual perspective while also communicating the sum of all of these parts.

When I first saw that Magoon wrote a sequel (companion?) to How It Went Down, I wondered...is that really necessary? The YA world has been saturated with books like The Hate U Give and Dear Martin lately, and I worried that it would become difficult for authors to tackle the topic in new and interesting ways.

The answer to my question was YES. It was necessary.

Like How It Went Down, this one is told from multiple perspectives. Some of the characters are the same, and some are characters new to us. A realistic portrayal of the climate of our nation and the racial tension that seems to build exponentially, Light It Up shows us what happens when an innocent young black man dies and nothing changes...so it happens again. Many scenes feel pulled right from the news and our social media feeds, and many are hard to read...especially considering how close to home they hit.

It felt like it took me MONTHS to read this book but its only been one month. I started this book while I was in a slump thinking it was going to take me out of it. It did slightly. I enjoyed the pacing of the story. I liked the perspectives of the different people such as Brick, Kimberly and Zeke. I DID NOT like the Officer's perspective (but I think that was the point). This book made me angry, sad, happy (there were some romance sprinkled) and angry again because just because this is a fictional story this happens everyday. A black person gets shot by an officer and then nothing happens to the officer. It's a never ending cycle.

Joining other topical books like Dear Martin by Nic Stone, All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, and of course Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give, this is a powerful narrative that can serve as an entry to the issue for white teens and perhaps a validation or reflection for teens of color.

Although the transition was generally seamless, perhaps I would have been better served by having read How It Went Down first. I was a little lost between all the characters, and even once I was able to keep them straight, I was left feeling as if the number of narratives made it difficult to get particularly deep with the individual characters. The ending also felt like hasty closure for many of the plotlines, and a lack of closure for many of them. While it might have been stylistic, reflecting the abruptness of the shift in national attention, it also made it feel even harder to maintain investment in the lives of the characters.

Timely, important, and beautifully written. There is nothing extra or gratuitous about this narrative. It is a flat-out must read, and my high school students will be as rapt as I was.

I finished “Light It Up” at a time when I wasn’t able to immediately write a review. Now, I’m trying to go back and review it a couple of weeks later. It’s hard; that’s on me. But, at the same time, the fact that I don’t really know what to say tells me that the book didn’t “hit and stick” – books that hit you where it hurts and end powerfully really stick with you; this one didn’t. But, there are a few things I can (and want to) say about the book.

This book is a follow-up to “How It Went Down,” which I read when it first came out. While I remember the basic premise of the book, I’ve forgotten a lot of the characters and the specifics. I think that hurt me when I read this book. I kept feeling like there were little things I was missing. So, to anyone wanting to read “Light It Up,” read (or reread) “How It Went Down” first FOR SURE!

As for the multiple narrators… there are a lot of them. It was confusing as first, but because they seem to appear in the same order most of the time, it wasn’t a huge problem. But, I’m an experienced, savvy reader. I think this large number of narrators that each only “speak” for a short time each time could prove challenging for some of my less experienced student readers.

One thing I truly loved about this book was Robb’s character arc. Many of the books I have read with similar topics have an all-Black cast, or White characters who are perpetrators or clueless, uninterested bystanders… and that’s fine (and probably the sad reality for many, many people). But I appreciated Robb’s character because it showed a White person trying to be an ally but getting it all wrong! Robb was a character that I could see some of myself in at points; I was able to learn a lot from him – see places where maybe my good intentions had gone awry in the past – and, through the voices of the other characters, see how I could do better in the future.

Then there’s the ending. I’m (hopefully!) not spoiling anything here – at least I’m trying not to - but the ending, to me, felt… off-topic, disconnected from the point of the whole book. I really want to talk more about this, but I don’t want to ruin anything for others, so I’ll stop. But I think this ending is what left me feeling kind of “meh” about the book as a whole.

Overall, though, I appreciated the wide range of individuals represented in this book. There are children, teens, college students, adults; people from all walks of life; people on all sides of the tragedy. A very complete picture of the fallout from a police shooting death is portrayed. The plot is fairly fast-paced, and the inclusion of the other goings-on in the characters’ lives keeps the story from getting monotonous. And this topic is important! We need to keep having books like this published so we can keep talking about this issue until it is resolved!

I was really excited for this book. I loved Dear Martin and The Hate U Give and I think in this climate books that help foster conversations about race are so, so important. I was really prepared to love it, but I didn’t. I didn’t feel invested in any of the vignettes because I didn’t feel like I was given the chance to know anyone’s story. It took me a third of the book to stop feeling completely confused. I didn’t hate this book, it just didn’t stand out to me.

Wow. That was a powerful book. I picked up this book because of the summary--13 year old girl, unarmed, is shot in the back by a police officer for essentially jogging while black. It's implied that she had her earbuds in as she did her usual routine of jogging and didn't hear the officer when he shot her. When I first started the book, the style of it kind of threw me because the story moved along from different perspectives and I was not yet familiar with the characters. But it didn't take me long to sort them out and it really helped tell the story, especially when discussions of racism, white privilege, and so on where happening between different characters. Many of the discussions covered in this book are reminiscent of real-life conversations I've had with people, both on and off social media. These are important conversations to have and I think this book is an important book to read, especially if you're not a POC, but you're trying to better understand what POC go through every day. On a related note, this is a follow-up of a previous book, How it Went Down, which covers the shooting of Tariq, who is mentioned several times in this book, but I did not know this when I began this story, and while reading the first book might add another layer of depth to this book, this story stands alone very well.

Special thanks to NetGalley, Kekla Magoon, and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was so realistic and challenged me to think much more deeply about racism and police brutality than any other fiction novel. It was raw, well written/authentic. It was a little hard to keep all the perspectives straight at first, but I got used to it very quickly and was amazed by how fleshed out each perspective was. I was worried that this book would feel forced or cliche after The Hate U Give, but it stands apart due to how it is written and how deep the emotions run. Well done - this one will stick with me.

How It Went Down was a great book, one that Angie Thomas credits with breathing life into The Hate U Give.

Light It Up is one of the most powerful books I’ve read in a long time. Two years after Tariq is shot and killed in How It Went Down, thirteen-year-old Shae is killed by Officer Henderson in the same neighborhood. This is the story of how that neighborhood comes to terms with yet another senseless killing, told through multiple perspectives, all authentic. Masterfully done.

Thanks to NetGalley for the electronic ARC.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a digital arc of this book in exchange for an honest review. I am also honored to have a signed copy by the author that I received at the ALA conference.

This book revolves around the circumstances of a thirteen year old black girl's death at the hands of a white police officer. What happened? Who saw it? What can the the black community do to stop this? Will the police officer get in trouble for killing the girl? Why or why not?

Light It Up contains multiple points of view, and almost everyone is connected to the case in some way. The members of the black community of Underhill know that they need to rise up and be heard, or there will be never be justice for Shae (the girl who is killed) or so many other innocent black lives that are taken. Through publications, protests, art, conversation, and social media they make their voices heard.

Part of why I loved this book is that I was constantly reminded that I always need to keep checking my own white privilege. There are white characters in the book that mean well or believe that hearing out "both sides" is the right way to go about things even though they might "not agree" with the white supremacist side. Microagressions are everywhere, and people like me have grown up being complicit in it. Light It Up reminds us that we will never be in the same situation people of color are and that we need to listen to them if we ever want to be able to help. That is part of the reason why I read books like this. To learn. But enough about white people. This story is actually about the black community rising up against white supremacy and they are amazing.

They are talented and intelligent and all of the characters come from different circumstances. There are interviews with professors, leaders of protests, and points of view of characters that experience the streets on a daily basis. There is a variety there, and that is so, so important.

And on another note, I loved *how* this book was written. I loved that there were several points of view. I understand that for some it may be hard to keep the points of view straight, but I found it easy once I got into the book. And I highly recommend this book to everyone.

This review is a bit messy, but that's how I feel when I love a book so much!

Thank you again to Netgalley and the publisher, and thank you to Kekla Magoon for being so talented.

A riveting, yet thoughtful novel centering on the murder of a thirteen-year-old Black girl by a cop and the aftermath in her community. Magoon tells the story through the perspectives of many of those involved in various ways.

As long as these incidents keep occurring and justice is not done, we will need books like this one. Sad, maddening, disheartening, but true.