Content Warning: This section references mental illness.

Kwame Alexander explores the different forms grief can take throughout Rebound, using characters’ responses to hardship to illuminate these differences. Alexander uses Charlie to show how grief can make one desire escape, Charlie’s mother to demonstrate how grief can lead one to bottle up emotions, and Skinny to reveal how grief can cause one to engage in dangerous behaviors.

Charlie initially avoids processing his grief by reading comics, turning down a game of basketball with his best friend, Skinny:

[He’d] much rather be

at home

lying across

[his] bed

reading comics (12).

He immerses himself in a fantastical world of superheroes who fight evil, wishing he had the power to travel to the past “and get outta / this black hole / [he’s] trapped in” (14). Charlie spends hours avoiding his friends and family so that he does not have to either feign normalcy or contend with the fact that people treat him differently after his father’s death. He also escapes to Flipper McGhees, an arcade, rather than face his mother or his friends at school.