In his terrific middle-grade debut, Jason Reynolds (When I Was the Greatest; Boy in the Black Suit; All American Boys with Brendan Kiely) tells the engaging story of two African American brothers who spend a month with their grandparents while their parents work on their struggling marriage. This worries 11-year-old Genie Harris. Most things do.
It doesn't take long for Genie to see how different "the little house all alone on the top of a hill" is from Brooklyn: "No brownstones with the cement stoops where you could watch the buses, ice cream trucks, and taxis ride by. Nope. North Hill, Virginia, was country. Like country country." There's new food, too, like grits, or, as Genie thinks, "movie prison food." And when Genie tells Grandpop wearing sunglasses inside "makes you look crazy," he learns that his grandfather is blind. This discovery worries him, too, especially when he sees a gun in his Grandpop's back pocket. Genie has hundreds of questions, all of which he writes down in a numbered list for future Google searches.
Unfolding family secrets and upsetting mishaps, major and minor, keep the pages flying, and how obsessive Genie and his "cool, confident," muscled and girl-crazy older brother, Ernie, settle in with their grandparents makes for a poignant, profound, often very funny story, told in an easy style as smooth as Grandma's banana pudding. New revelations abound: their uncle's death in Desert Storm, masked fears, pea-picking, loud thunder, people who eat squirrels, the ins and outs of Grandpop's mysterious six-shooter, sweet tea and more. As Brave As You spills over with humor and heart. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness