Twenty-four Seconds from Now … Jason Reynolds. 2024. Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books. 253 pages. [Source: ARC provided by the publisher courtesy of Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.]
How many times do Black boys get to be the center of a love story? I don’t mean a coming of age novel with hints of dating among the minutiae of teen life. I mean a story that is completely focused on the evolution of a romantic relationship and its growth over time into new depths and discoveries. With Twenty-four Seconds from Now, Jason Reynolds has created an ode to the complexities of love with all its myriad questions, feelings, and fears, and centers a character that is too often ignored when considering how teens understand and engage around romantic relationships.
What immediately stood out to me about this book is that it’s a love story told in reverse. It actually starts with the main character, seventeen year old Neon, psyching himself up for his first time with his girlfriend Aria. From wondering why nobody warned him about the sensory overload he’d experience to questioning if he lotioned his legs, Neon allows the reader an glimpse into the inner world of a teen who’s encountering so many aspects of love, sex, and intimacy for the first time. As the book progresses, it ultimately leads back 24 months prior to the start of Aria and Neon’s friendship. The entire book is told from Neon’s perspective, so it’s refreshing to see how he navigates friendships, family, and community while also laying bare the uncomfortable experiences and insecurites of a teen trying to understand what lessons to apply or leave on the proverbial table.
What also sticks out in Twenty-four Seconds from Now is that it depicts a range of relationships, not just romantic. The core characters of the book include the yearbook club comprised of Aria and Neon’s closest friends as well as their respective families. The two are part of a thriving community, and those relationships are highlighted throughout the book. More specifically, however, Reynolds uses these relationships to demonstrate how love and intimacy can manifest in different and unexpected ways, and absolutely applies to familial and platonic relationships as well. Whether it’s Neon’s sister’s roster of men she’s dating to Neon’s parents and to Aria’s complicated relationship with her mother, the reader gets to see examples of different relationships and their failures and successes. They’re not all bad or all good, and it’s this perspective that’s so valuable — real life can be messy or complicated or confusing all at once. And for someone in their own serious relationship for the first time, like Neon is, the wisdom and lessons gained from these other relationships form the basis of how he makes sense of his own with Aria and others.
Ultimately, Twenty-four Seconds from Now is an intimate book. Not in a sexual way — though that is certainly a looming topic — it’s more about the emotional closeness that the characters have with each other. I loved seeing the group of friends show up for each other in ways both mundane and signficant, as a way of modeling healthy friendships for an age group where toxicity can reign. But there’s also a transparency and openness that Neon has among his family and friends that make for thought-provoking conversations and reflections.
Twenty-four Seconds from Now gets a resounding recommendation from me. As a parent, this is absolutely the kind of book that I would want my child to read as they enter into more serious relationships that come with the teenager years. It doesn’t sensationalize or trivialize the real experiences that teens encounter as they develop their own relationships, and that makes them all the more relatable. It’s a love story and perspective that’s long overdue, filled with vulnerability that will likely be familiar to its target audience. It should definitely be on the shelf of a beloved teen in your life.
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