Ain’t Burned All the Bright
Written by Jason Reynolds
Illustrated by Jason Griffin
Atheneum, 2022, 384 pp (unpaged)
ISBN: 978-1534439467

Reynolds’ and Griffin’s latest collaboration melds their poetic and artistic strengths to create an unforgettable YA book that comments on life in the middle of a pandemic. The book is divided in three distinct parts named for three breaths that speak to the right to breathe freely in society with health and with hope.

Breath One speaks to the fearful confusion that a Black child faces as he lives through what is ostensibly a double pandemic: age-old systematic racism and the illness and death that COVID-19 brought to the planet and specifically to economically challenged communities within the US. The scene is set with the young narrator struggling to make sense of all that is happening. At first readers see stereotypes of a small Black family as disconnected family members unaware of each other’s struggles. At the beginning of the book technology in the form of TV, a gaming device and a telephone seem to dominate this small family’s existence. Three siblings live in their own separate worlds due to their devices; their mother seems to be shut in her own world, continuously watching the television while the same news story of violence, death, fire and destruction is played repeatedly in words and images. A sister is always on the phone, a brother on his gaming device, and the narrator is an observer who questions and comments.

In the second portion of the book, Breath Two, the father is in the next room, sick with COVID as he coughs and strains against the illness. The narrator is stopped by the mother as he tries to physically approach his father. The readers see the positive impact of a sick father, who is connected to his family who, even though he cannot be near them physically. He is depicted as “screaming his love through the door.” In hopes of helping, the narrator searches for an elusive oxygen mask that would heal all.

The final portion of this book is Breath Three in which the narrator creates a list of images that can be interpreted as picturing a hopeful future where one can breathe freely as a human and as a Black child growing up in an underprivileged family. Here the accepted stereotypes are broken as the family comes together as if they have awakened to each other’s presence after a long nightmarish sleep. The parents bring the siblings together as the ties to technological devices are broken “and my mother raises her voice inside and tells us all to sit down and my father yells the same from the other room.”

Reynolds and Griffin use the interplay of words and images to create the raw emotion of the book. The repetitive words are written in typeface cutouts and are poetic, flowing with a rhythm that’s tangible. The colors and images have their own language and add to the emotion. Griffin’s mesmerizing collages in multimedia accurately and symbolically capture a constant state of apprehension and dread, but later lead to visual moments that encourage the reader to focus on the positive. Initially, colors are predominantly black and red on lined and unlined paper. The images are flat geometric shapes and many of them depict fire. Some pages are left black especially where police violence is referred to by TV anchors. Later in the book the colors change to include some with greenery and trees; even the black pages are broken and interspersed with white dots in reference to stars on a clear night.

One cannot ignore the political aspect of the narrative. The symbolism of Black fists and fighting against injustice are present in the visual and the verbal aspects of the story. While this is a story that takes place during the pandemic, the narrative adds layers that make this book stand alone and reflect Black and Brown lives over time. The injustices, violence, and the police brutality represented makes this narrative timeless. This work of art is a fusion of verbal and visual art as it captures what it is to be Black in the present-day. This masterpiece speaks truth to power as it tracks and honors Black lives. As a novel-length picturebook, it may be a quick read, but it is hard to put down as readers look through the layers and read between the lines, coming away with a multitude of thought-provoking details.

Technology played a huge role in the sheer creation and making of this book because of the world being in a lock down.The back and forth of images and writing happened online for both Jasons. The book garnered many awards and honors. It is a Caldecott Honor winner, and was also named an NCTE Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts, a Boston Globe/Horn Book Award winner, an ALA/YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults and won a spot on the international White Raven Award list.

This book can be paired with many others depending on the theme. While this book is a stand-alone in its political and social commentary through closely related words and images, other books that have the same verbal and visual interplay and magic include Brian Selznick’s books like Big Tree (2023). The theme of modern civil rights is a rich one to explore, starting with an early activist in Choosing Brave: How Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till Sparked the Civil Rights Movement (Angela Joy & Janelle Washington, 2022) and Reynolds’ collaboration with Ibram X. Kendi (2020) on racism in the U.S., Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You. Reynolds tackles another form of technology, guns, in his novel-in-verse Long Way Down (2019).

Jason Reynolds is a renowned New York Times bestselling author and has won many book awards and lifetime achievement recognition. He was also the 2020–2022 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Reynolds writes in many genres (poetry, contemporary fiction, historical fiction, graphic novels, picturebook biography). Ain’t Burned All the Bright is his second collaboration with Jason Griffin. Together they created My Name is Jason. Mine too. Our Story. Our Way (2022), which chronicles their friendship. Reynolds lives and works in Washington, DC, and can be accessed through JasonWritesBooks.com.

Jason Griffin won a Caldecott Honor for his artwork in Ain’t Burned All the Bright. He made the images for this book on pocket-sized moleskine. He has presented his work nationally and internationally. His most recent projects include a mural commissioned for the children’s cancer wing at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx and an art residency in Amsterdam. He currently lives and works in Queens, New York

Seemi Aziz, University of Arizona

© 2024 by Seemi Aziz

WOW Review, Volume XVI, Issue 4 by Worlds of Words is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on work by Seemi Aziz at https://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/review/xvi-4/4/

WOW review: reading across cultures
ISSN 2577-0527