All the Noise at Once
Author: DeAndra Davis
Autistic high school football player Aidan is sent reeling by his supportive older brother Brandon’s unjust arrest. How will he manage on his own? Can he prove Brandon’s innocence?
Our Young Reviewers Say:
Aiden is a Black, autistic high school football player. His older brother Brandon is wrongfully arrested while trying to protect him from police. That is the premise of the 2025 middle grade/YA crossover novel All the Noise at Once, but what Davis does with it is the literary argument.
She does not let any single part of Aiden’s identity carry the entire novel. His autism is not a metaphor for his pain. His Blackness is not shorthand for his trauma. His athleticism is not a redemption arc. These are just parts of who he is- all of them present, all of them in tension, all of them real. That is not just representation. That is exceptional writing. It is what Newbery criteria call distinguished delineation of character, and it earns that description.
Louder Than Hunger by John Schu had the distinction of being the inaugural Youth Choice Award in 2025 and readers identified with the weight of how mental health intersects with identity. DeAndra Davis is working in that same space. She just gets there through a lens I have not seen before.
Awards have two layers. The rubrics you can read. The room you cannot enter. As Lin Manuel Miranda put it in Hamilton, the power lives with the people who were “in the room where it happened.”
As chair of the committee, I took my neutrality seriously with a focus on listening, asking questions, and making space for my peers to lead. They did not disappoint. The conversations were sharp, personal, and grounded in the text. That is what this award is supposed to reflect.
Having said that, I would like to give you my own personal review of All the Noise at Once. My mind is built differently than most, I am high-functioning Autistic and my profile is sensory-seeking. Aiden is sensory-avoidant but I recognized the truth of his experience, the way noise becomes a physical thing, the way a team can be your most stabilizing environment and your most overwhelming one simultaneously. I know what it means to exceed the standard and still be the one people are trying to figure out. I know what it means to perform under sensory load and still be expected to communicate clearly. Aiden’s experience on his fictional football field is different from mine as an Olympic Development Program water polo player, but the emotional architecture is similar. Davis wrote that architecture with precision I did not expect from a young adult book, especially in a debut.
I will be honest about my bias: this book mattered to me before I finished it. I knew that going into deliberations, and I kept my opinion to myself. The committee did not need my influence. They came to it on their own.
The Youth Choice Award exists, in part, because of gaps like this one. Kids are more likely to read the books they choose. We chose this one not because an adult told us it mattered, but because we, every member of the committee, lived it on every page.
DeAndra Davis wrote something genuinely rare. The Robie Harris Youth Choice Award is our way of saying: we saw it.
If you are a young reader – especially if you are an athlete, or neurodivergent, or someone who has watched a person you love face a system that was not built to protect them, read this book. Not because someone assigned it. Because it was written for you.
And because kids chose it first.
About Our Young Reviewer
Quade Kelley is the founder of Reading Athlete and co-founder of the Robie Harris Youth Choice Award which was co-chaired in 2025 and chaired in 2026. He has served as the only Youth Voice on the School Library Journal Heavy Medal Mock Newbery Committee in 2024, 2025 & 2026, and as a Bank Street Youth Reviewer since 2020. He is the youngest member of the Children’s Book Committee since it was founded in 1909.
–Quade, age 17, San Diego, CA
Years as a Youth Reviewer: 7
Young people who are interested in reviewing are invited to do so as we welcome the individual perspective of our age-appropriate readers. If you are interested in being a reviewer, contact youngreviewers@bankstreet.edu
See our Monthly Picks Archive 2012–2018, and our Monthly Picks 2019–present.