The Crossover by Kwame Alexander

I have Richie, our school's athletic director and varsity basketball coach, to thank for finding this one. He got our librarian to buy a couple of copies for his basketball team. I'm not sure how that worked out for him, but I'm glad he got the books into our collection. I've found this an invaluable text for my athletic boys and yet, I hadn't actually read it. Until now.

I think most people when they are just learning to be a reader self choose texts that have characters they can identify with in some way. It doesn't have to be as simple as gender, age, or ethnicity. It can be something nebulous like a personality quirk, but no matter how small, some sense of commonality with the characters draws in the readers. Later, as a reader develops, they become more adept at finding points of connection with the literature. Everything gets easier with practice.

That being said, reading literature with protagonists who are very different from oneself, can be draining even if you enjoy the story. This is why I can only read a few sport boy books in a row. I very much enjoy them because they remind me of my students, but I don't tend to have many points of commonality with athletic teenage boys. As a result, I have to spend more time thinking about what's happening in the story which keeps me from fully immersing in the text.

The Crossover was surprisingly easy to immerse in. Josh and Jordan Bell are twins who both have a passion for basketball. The story is told through Josh's poetry. Being twins they have a close relationship but things begin to change as they look towards beginning high school. They growing apart.

I always worry that the verse format will be distancing. Poems are lovely, but they often require a focus on the words to decipher the meaning. However, Alexander's poetry has the opposite effect, it draws the reader in.  Because they are poems, the writing is closer to Josh's emotions without feeling overblown.

I see why my boys are so enamored of the book: lots of white space on the page, fast paced, yet sophisticated themes.