Booked by Kwame Alexander

I've been delving into this Verse Novel format more. It's a strange way to read a story and not at all like the epics I teach. When I first heard of it, I thought it would be clumsy and difficult for a young audience in the same ways that reading the epics are. I was wrong.

I was wrong because my assumptions were flawed. Epics are difficult for younger readers because of the use of poetic conceits and need for abstraction in approaching even basic plot points on top of overarching difficulty with approaching a fundamentally alien culture that happens with any translated literature. Verse novels are a new format for YA so the text is written with a contemporary YA audience in mind. I'm not sure how well they will wear as time marches on, but for now they are very accessible. The authors have mostly dispensed with poetic conceits by entirely writing in a straightforward blank verse. While descriptive and expressive language is still of primary importance, the use of metaphor and simile tends to be used more sparingly and with more in-text explanation. The result is actually more concrete than prose in some cases because the poetry format allows a more direct description of character emotion without feeling heavy handed. Couple that with the greater amount of whitespace on the page and it explains why this format is so successful with struggling readers.

Of course some examples of the format are better than others. After reading The Crossover,  I immediately picked up Alexander's other verse novel: Booked. It's an excellent book, but not as emotionally devastating as The Crossover.

Nick Hall is a middle school soccer star. His dad is a linguistics professor and his mother is an out of work horse trainer. All Nick wants to do is play soccer, but when his mom leaves the house to take a job, Nick's relationship with his dad gets strained. Add on top of that a couple of neighborhood bullies and Nick is having a rough year.

I liked how intelligent Nick was. His voice felt appropriate for a 13 year old boy, but his approach to issues was more than usually thoughtful and his expression more articulate (thanks to his father's word obsession). While he rebels a little at the academic expectations, he also revels in his use of words which is a lot of fun to read.

The bully angle is not the primary focus of the book, but the subplot is well handled and resolves well. Overall, it's a good read.

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.