I'm kicking myself that I dragged my feet to read this wonderful exploration of race, mass incarceration, and hope. It didn't shy away from exploring the emotional, spiritual and physical toll imprisonment took on Amal. From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

One day, he finds himself in a wrong-place-wrong-time altercation, one that would have been excused as “boys being boys” if it weren’t for the colour of his skin. Can you be less cranky and not make your classes feel like someone else has punished you to do your job and in turn shove that hatred towards your students? The book discusses the many systems put in place by white Americans that disadvantage and discriminate against Black people.This is also written in verse, and I think it lends itself very well to the text - giving Amal a more human, emotional connection to the reader as we get to experience Amal's life from his deepest, most inner thoughts. We see his inner thoughts, musings and coping mechanisms and they felt so authentic for a sixteen year old. Choices are given to them but I feel far better choices and more choices must be made available for them.

It presented well the angst, the confusion, the loneliness, the beliefs of the narrator but I didn't get that connected to the character. I was only vaguely aware of the CP5 case until I watched When They See Us and when I saw that Yusef Salaam was a co-author, I was quite intrigued. Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal’s bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sent to prison.One was the way the book talks about how Amal, the black defendant, is portrayed as a fully-grown man, who has never "laughed at Elmo on Sesame Street" or "splashed in a puddle" or "been afraid of monsters", in contrast with the white victim who is a "boy".

It is a book about race and the way the judicial system and prison system in America disproportionately fails and oppresses black people. Content warnings include violence, bullying, police and prison guard brutality, racialized violence and slurs including multiple uses of ni**er. Another is that Punching the Air really explains how the prison system in America is a form of legal slavery-- it is written in the Constitution.

A fight soon breaks out, in which Amal admits he threw the first punch, but Amal was not the person who beat up a white kid named Jeremy Mathis with his skateboard. I cannot begin to tell you how each of these verse punches you in the gut again and leave you feeling helpless about the injustice faced by Alaam and real-life imprisoned people.

Amal sees the injustice in the system, sees how institutional racism marks him as a criminal even though he is a kid. they see it like that, we haven't been standing a chance and it's so tiring to fight and fight, because it's feels like punching the air but if we don't fight then we let them win and it's already time we win, we become the kings and queens of this world whom try to erase us. In reality, Amal ran away from the scene, forgetting his skateboard at the fight, and was arrested on his way home. It couldn’t be a better time to pick this up amongst your menu of BIPOC fiction and it would complement anyone’s plan to educate themselves more. Kirkus Reviews, [1] TIME, [20] Shelf Awareness, [21] School Library Journal, [22] the New York Public Library, [23] and Publishers Weekly [24] named Punching the Air one of the best young adult books of 2020.Based on the true story of Yusef Salaam, a fifteen year old boy wrongly convicted and imprisoned for several years, Punching the Air explores the harsh reality of teenagers tried like adults.