The Plot: Eileen Spinelli's Another Day as Emily (2014) tells the story of 12-year-old Suzy's summer. The narrative begins with Suzy's younger brother being hailed as a hero by neighbors and the local news for calling 911 after their elderly next-door neighbor takes a fall. Suzy begins to feel neglected and overlooked after this incident and the several that follow: she feels her mother pays more attention to her 4-year-old brother, she doesn't get cast in a play she auditions for, and she has to miss a special birthday baseball game with her father when her brother gets lost. Suzy, in the midst of her summer project on everyday life in the 1800s, decides to emulate the poet Emily Dickinson's "life of solitude." She asks her family and friends to call her Emily, she wears only white dresses, she refuses visitors and outings, and makes a list of Emily-approved activities (including writing letters and poems, playing piano, baking, reading, making breakfast, washing dishes, dusting, gardening, playing with the dog, listening to crickets, and caring for sick family members). The most interesting aspects in Spinelli's unnecessarily long verse novel is the character's fascination with Dickinson, but we don't get to this part until almost 100 pages into the narrative and even then it isn't fully developed. There are multiple pieces of disconnected narratives (her grandmother in Arizona is ill, her neighbor boy who has an alcoholic father is accused of stealing, and so on) that don't lead anywhere and ultimately make the book tedious and uninteresting at points.The Poetry: The most disappointing thing about Another Day as Emily was the lack of poetic technique or form throughout in a book that is inspired by Emily Dickinson. The book is filled with short free verse poems. The poems come one after another on the same page eliminating the space that appears in most verse novels and collections of poetry, and these blank spaces are filled by Joanne Lew-Vritethoff's pencil illustrations that appear sporadically in the margins. There isn't much attention to line, which would be fine, but the book also lacks attention to space, lyric, image, and anything else that might distinguish it as falling within any poetic tradition. Even poems that draw directly from and quote Dickinson fall flat, like "Hope" which includes the first stanza of Dickinson's "Hope is a thing with feathers":
I chose this one
because I've been
feeling grumpy lately.
But now I'm not.
Now I've got hope
The Page: Spinelli's verse novel is ultimately a missed opportunity for a writer and her protagonist to use the verse novel form and a tradition of American poetry as inspiration. Suzy only attempts to write two poems in the 224 page narrative, and both depict her as being apathetic and bored by poetry although she is an avid reader and lover of books.perching in my soul (128).
I give Another Day as Emily one star.
