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.

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Our media specialist does a good job of featuring new additions to the library, and when she first brought The One and Only Ivan into the library, it sat on display for a couple of months. Nobody, as far as I know, checked it out. This is the problem with getting people/kids interested in books. A good display is a fine thing, but it takes more. You almost have to run an ad campaign and really sell it. That's why book talks work.

So, anyway it languished there. Even I didn't do more than pick it up a flip through it a couple of times. Honestly, even though the library has always served middle and high school ages, most of the foot traffic is high schools because of its location and The One and Only Ivan looks like a book aimed at a younger set. The print is large, there's plenty of white space on the page, and there are plenty of illustrations.

It really is aimed at an audience starting at about the 4th grade. However, it's a well written and impactful story. I'm not an overly sentimental person, but it even got me tearing up at the end. I would recommend it to just about anyone regardless of age.

It's the story of Ivan, a gorilla born in the wild but raised in captivity who lives in a sad little display with elephants and other exotics. He also has little mutt of a dog, Bob, as a friend. Things change for Ivan when a new baby elephant named Ruby arrives.

As it turns out, Ivan in the book is based off of Ivan in the Atlanta Zoo who spent about 30 years isolated in a display out on the West Coast. Shifting understandings of primate needs caused a public outcry and Ivan was rescued. He's now on permanent loan to Zoo Atlanta where he is part of a primate group with females and juveniles, a much better situation.

The book is only loosely based on the real story, but it's still a story worth reading.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

This is one of those books that I've been waiting to read for a while.

Usually I'm pretty aware when one of my authors is about to put out a new book. I don't necessarily track them, but I tend to keep an eye out and the digital commercial overlords are usually pretty good about notification. However, I tripped across this book when on a trip with some friends in Asheville. It came out of nowhere really. That was a couple of years ago.

I've been avoiding buying books (they just sort of collect up in drifts against the walls when I'm not looking) and there have been so many other things out there on my list to read. One of my coworkers had this lying around and he handed it to me at the beginning of break. So, I figured it was time to get around with it.

Gaiman's written a lot of different types of literature. He writes graphic novels, short stories, adult novels, picture books, kids lit, and now middle reader/YA. Thematically, he tends to stick to a kind of benign dark fantasy.

The Graveyard Book is the story of a toddler who miraculously escapes a serial killer and ends up raised by a cemetery full of benevolent ghosts (and one.... I think he's meant to be a vampire.) The boy grows up, but the killer is still out there. The ghosts try to educate him, but there are problems of course.

If I have a criticism, it's that having introduced the villain he sort of disappears and it is unclear through most of the text that there is anything really supernatural about him at all. He could just be a maniac, after all. Of course there is something up with him, and it does become clear eventually.

It's a fun read read: quick and satisfying.