A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

I read the entire Time Quintet, which is begun with A Wrinkle in Time, when I was a kid. I know that I did, but I can't remember exactly when. I know that most of it was before middle school, because I was surprised when I discovered the fourth book, Many Waters, on a shelf in the middle school library.

Some how the memories linked with A Wrinkle In Time are tied up with my memories of the first grade and Mrs. Brodie's class, but that can't be right because even though I was a little precocious in how I learned to read, I can't have been that advanced. At a guess, I must have been around 8 or 9 which explains some things about my memories of the book. Specifically, I couldn't remember anything about it except that I loved it.

I think I must have been too young for a lot of the concepts to stick despite being drawn in by the characters of Meg and Charles Wallace.

Meg struggles in school. She's smart but she can't seem to do things the way her teachers expect...even though she comes up with the right answers. She gets in trouble and she gets in fights. Many of these fights are in defense of her baby brother, Charles Wallace. Charles Wallace is odd. He's four but he speaks like an adult and seems to be able to read the minds of both Meg and her mother.

Charles Wallace and Meg live with their mother and twin brothers. Dad has disappeared mysteriously which is another cause for friction. One dark and stormy night the mysterious Mrs. Whatsit appears which leads the two kids along with their friend Calvin on a journey to rescue their father from a world consumed by an evil shadow.

This is a supremely cool book for kids. Meg is one of those universal characters. I think every kid, girl or boy, at some point feels out of step with the rest of the world and gets angry. That's probably what drew me in at such a young age, but the narrative encourages young readers to think about things like theoretical physics and what the consequences would be. It's just really cool; there is a reason it's survived with young readers for over 50 years and hasn't somehow become dated.

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.