Wow. If I had to pick a mandatory read, this would certainly be a contender.

I finally finished another book! Lol. Just Mercy was honestly a really, really great book. I read it for English class and I'm not gonna lie to you- I picked it because there is a movie out and I figured why not read the book before the movie. I expected it to be like any other book I read for class-kinda boring but still good enough to gain my interest. I am almost 100% sure I wouldn't have picked this book up on my own as a free read book but I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoy...

This book should be required reading for all high school students, if not all Americans.

A fantastic adaptation for young adults! The chapters about incarcerated youth are enlightening, shocking, and basically unbearable. This book is equal parts important and inspiring!

Using the power of personal narrative, Bryan Stevenson recounts his years working as a lawyer for Death Row inmates in the Deep South. He uses the case of Walter McMilllan, a black man wrongfully accused of murder, as a sort of case study by which to study the prejudices and injustices that lurk behind Death Row. Along with the following the harrowing six-year process to free McMillan, Stevenson also pulls from other experiences to discuss other atrocities within the prison system: individuals c...

This was a great book. 👍 It sheds necessary light on parts of our inadequate justice (or rather injustice) system. Told in memoir style, this follows a lawyer through some of his cases and personal experiences. I wanted to read it before watching the movie. 😉

Should be mandatory reading. Pair with Dead Man Walking. And We’ll Fly Away for a fiction pairing. Author read the audio.Excellent, but still made me sick about how we treat people in this country.

Interesting (and true) accounts of falsely imprisoned (or imprisoned for longer than "necessary") people in Alabama, written by a lawyer serving near where To Kill a Mockingbird is set. Stevenson (very admirably) devotes his life to helping imprisoned people.Instead of complaining about "institutional racism" and teaching criminals that they're victims, I wish more emphasis was put on teaching boys who grow up in crime-ridden areas to obey the law, to be honest, and to realize that children dese...

A very hard and emotional read. There's so much I could say, but I don't think I can put everything I'm feeling about this book into words. I'll just say, I'm very thankful for Bryan Stevenson and the work he has done.

PLEASE read this book. It is essential. Our prison system (and also sometimes our judicial and legal systems) is a racist disaster. When I read this book I wanted to punch things and cry and I wonder HOW people can be so cruel. But also I felt hope. And that is a gift.

This was chosen as our staff book club read for the spring of 2021 and had been on the shelves of my middle school building for at least a year prior to that. I had seen the movie adaptation of the story, so I had a pretty good sense of what would "happen" but I was very interested in seeing how the book unfolded. I had one teacher who came up to me to tell me she couldn't quit reading until she got to the end of the book and how much of an impact it had on her. The story is compelling and the w...

Read for class. Very well put together and insightful. I just don’t rate memoirs/nonfiction, but it was great.

This should be required reading for high school students.I have had teens tell me they are required to read a nonfiction book over 150 pages and there isn’t much in YA.Here you go, teachers. Assign this

"We have been quick to celebrate the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, and slow to recognize the lasting damage of marginalization and subordination done in the Jim Crow Era." Can we stop making high schoolers read things like Catcher in the Rye and start having them read things like this? This book will make you re-think your stance on capital punishment and mass incarceration. It brings to light the level of outrageous racial injustice still running rampant in our justice system. Than...

Wow, what an incredible book. The work this guy has done in challenging economic and racial inequalities in the legal system is just mind boggling...

This book shows how wrong the people in prison and death row are treated. It was really good but sad at the same time. It was also a bit boring to read. Pretty much on every page there was a name of either a person, a prison, a court, or something similar to that, which made it kind of hard to read. There's just way too many names, that it just made it boring to me and made me get lost a lot.

A perfect choice for a One School, One Book read or a "community read." I'd prefer, "One country, one read." The adult version is a life-changer, and I read this one and the adult version at the same time, reading a chapter at a time from each book so that I essentially got the story twice in 2 days. Here's how they compare:--This version is much more concise; details were omitted, vocabulary sometimes changed (i.e. anomaly --> mystery), some sections rearranged, and longer sentences sometimes s...

I didn’t realize this was the youth version, so that was disappointing. However, this is a compelling look at stories where the justice system has failed. It is an important reminder that we must be careful when it comes to matters of justice and that there are things that can and should be reformed.

so all i have to say about this book is..eh. eh. it was alright. the main topic of the story was good, but i found myself skimming over the pages because it took so long just to get to the point. in my opinion, Stevenson explained way too much, about things that were irrelevant to the story. some of the chapters were interesting, when they actually contributed to the topic, but others that were completely irrelevant were just hard to get through. i would skip whole chapters because they really j...

Read it to my 13 and 15 year olds. They were angered and saddened but agreed that it was important that they know about inequities in our justice system.