All American Boys
All American Boys
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Jason Reynolds on All American Boys
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
One phone call that happened and one that didn’tReynolds and Brendan Kiely met on a group promotional tour for their respective debut novels, playing to near-empty rooms. Then, while they were still on the road, a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Reynolds was stuck with a man he barely knew, unsure whether to say anything at all.
I’m angry and I’m frustrated and I’m sort of wrought with emotion — and I’m traveling and living with a stranger.
When Reynolds’s mother called him during that same tour, she was frightened for her son, a Black man traveling the country in the months after Zimmerman walked free. Kiely, watching from his side, noticed what the call revealed: Reynolds’s mother had picked up the phone out of fear for her son’s life, while Kiely’s own mother had no comparable reason to do so. That gap between the two calls became the core argument for why the book needed two distinct narrators rather than one. But Reynolds still resisted. Kiely came to him after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson and said he couldn’t take it anymore. What shifted Reynolds was a structural solution the dual-narrator form made possible.
If there’s another person in the story and we get to have this dual narrative, then my character gets to live. And this was very important for me because I think the tricky part about these stories is that the easiest way to tell them is to tell them from the perspective of a kid who dies. [paraphrased from audio]
Letting Rashad survive was also personal, rooted in Reynolds’s own community. The public conversation around police violence tends to center on those who don’t make it home. Reynolds grew up watching a different and quieter harm: people who lived through brutality and found that the world moved on without them.
I grew up with a bunch of people who experienced police brutality and did not die. And it’s as if it never happened.
How he wrote it
A constitution, a secret, and ten days to reviseReynolds and Kiely set rules before a single chapter was drafted. Reynolds described the agreement as something close to a founding document: no white saviors, no competing egos, and a mutual understanding that if the friendship broke under the weight of the material, the book would be worthless to either of them. They then kept the project entirely hidden while they worked.
We wrote the book in secrecy. Our agents didn’t know; nobody knew until it was complete. We finished the novel and then presented it to our agents and the book was sold in like three days.
Secrecy was a calculated bet, not modesty. Reynolds knew the subject was volatile enough that a rough draft shopped too early could damage both careers. The reasoning he laid out to himself before starting was blunt: do it completely or don’t do it.
It’s a heavy topic, and if it goes wrong, if we do it poorly, it could be a major hit to our careers. So it was our job to do our due diligence to make sure we were the obvious choice. If we’re going to do this thing, we’re going to do it 100 percent, and then if they deny us they are fools.
Reynolds chose first person for Rashad’s chapters at a moment when publishers still defaulted to third person for young adult fiction about difficult subjects. The decision was about removing every layer of insulation between the character’s voice and the reader.
First person is amazing for immediacy and for building a visceral tangibility. You can’t be at a distance of a person who is talking to you in a natural voice. There is no omniscient narrator, no untouchable voice. This is a tangible voice and it’s speaking directly to you, so you can’t turn away.
Writing Rashad’s half also meant sitting with a version of the book Reynolds initially wanted to make and then deliberately pulling back from it. His first instinct was pure anger, which he describes as an honest emotional response. What stopped him from staying there was a craft judgment about what that register would actually produce.
If I’m going to be honest about the emotional backdraft, I have to also be honest about everything else.
Once the book sold, the publisher accelerated production to get it out while the national conversation around police violence and race was still in full public view. Normal revision cycles of two to three months per pass compressed to around ten days. Reynolds found himself more absorbed by Quinn’s chapters than Rashad’s, partly because Quinn’s story had no existing public template.
The whole country knows the character of Rashad. The whole country has seen what has been happening with young people of color being brutalized by police officers. What we don’t talk about enough is the story of the Quinns of the world and how they’re processing and dealing and where they stand in the midst of all these things.
The personal thread
Richard Wright and all the little JasonsReynolds didn’t come to novels as a child. He was 16 when he and his friends were forced out of a van by police who found nothing. He was 17 when he read his first novel. Both experiences fed directly into Rashad’s chapters, but he has spoken more specifically about the second one as the model for what he wanted the book to do.
I didn’t read a novel until I was 17, and it was Richard Wright’s Black Boy. That book changed everything because he sounded like my family, the way he spoke. Now, when I sit at the page, all I can think of are all the little Jasons who need something to read that they can see themselves in.
Reynolds initially resisted writing the book because he was too close to the violence it depicts. His reluctance wasn’t strategic; it was the reluctance of someone who has not processed his own proximity to a thing and is not eager to do that processing in public, on deadline, in a co-authored novel. The dual-narrative structure resolved that resistance by giving Rashad room the plot would otherwise deny him.
I did not want to make this book because I am so close to the violence. I’m not interested in intellectualizing my life in that way. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Questions only, no exitsReynolds has been asked repeatedly whether the book takes a side. His answer separates the book’s target from its method. The goal was never to hand readers a resolved position; it was to make the conversation unavoidable.
There are no answers in this book. Only questions. Our mission was to simply create a tool, a framework for young people, and all others, to have uncomfortable discourse.
Reynolds has also pushed back on the “anti-police” charge that followed the book into school ban debates. His reframe shifts the accusation without neutralizing the argument, redirecting it toward what he sees as the more telling absence in the national conversation.
The novel is not anti-police. It’s just not. But since we’re on the topic of anti-police, I wish people were more pro-kid. Just saying.
Reynolds resists being called an activist, not out of indifference to the cause but out of respect for people who have given their bodies to it. He draws a different line around his own work, one that doesn’t require a political label to carry political weight.
Frankly, anything made by a person of color is politically bent by default. To me, our lives, our existence in any space in this country, are implicitly political. Just being is a statement.
In 2020, five years after publication and in the middle of a summer when the book’s subject dominated every news cycle, Reynolds was asked about its legacy. His answer was the opposite of a monument-building statement.
It would be dope if, like, for the ten-year anniversary the book goes out of print. Like it’s just not necessary anymore. It’s like historical fiction, you know. That would be awesome.
The book was written to solve a problem. Reynolds’s measure of success is its own obsolescence.