Thanhha Lai's _Inside Out and Back Again_

The Plot: Thanhha Lai's 2011 Inside Out and Back Again, a Newbery Honor book and winner of the National Book Award for Young People (along with Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming and Virginia Euwer Wolff's True Believer, one of only three verse novels to ever win the award), follows 10-year-old Hà during a period of one year in her life in which she flees Vietnam with her family after the fall of Saigon and then struggles to adjust to her new life in Alabama. As Lai explains in her author's note, "much of what happened to Hà... also happened to me" (261). Lai further notes that her goal in writing Inside Out and Back Again was to capture Hà's emotional life on the page, as well as use her own memories to provide insight into the beauties of Vietnam and the "challenges of starting over in a strange land" for first generation Vietnamese-American children (262). The narrative begins with the poem "1975: Year of the Cat" and describes how Hà's family celebrates the first day of the lunar calendar. Hà lives with her mother and three older brothers in Saigon; her father has been MIA for the past nine years. Early poems also focus on Hà's beloved papaya tree.

The Poetry: Lai's verse novel utilizes free verse, often with a short line, throughout her narrative. Because Hà is intently focused on learning a new language during a good portion of the narrative, several poems make use of sound (particularly the elongated S-sound). The poem "War and Peace" is an interesting example of Lai's use of ekphrasis and makes use of anaphora, imagery, and caesura to delve into her young protagonist's experience of her American teacher's belittling her culture. (This poem calls to mind a similar experience detailed in Marilyn Nelson's title poem in How I Discovered Poetry.) The poem begins, "MiSSS SScott / shows the class / photographs" and the four stanzas that follow go on to describe iconic images of the Vietnam War; most notably the second stanza describes Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize winning "The Terror of War" depicting "a burned, naked girl / running, crying / down a dirt road" (194). The speaker of the poem goes on to lament this reductive description of where she is from that leaves out the things she loves most about her country.

The Page: Divided into four sections--"Saigon," "At Sea," "Alabama," and "From Now On"-- each poem ends with either a specific date or more general temporal designations such as "every day." The verse novel opens and closes with a poem on the lunar new year (1975 and 1976), emphasizing the tumultuous year in the protagonist's life and the hope she has for the future in her new home.

As a genealogical verse novel, Thanhha Lai's Inside Out and Back Again is an example of an award-winning work that explores the immigrant experience in a nuanced way that does not sugar-coat the harsh realities of racism faced by the young protagonist and her family. I give Inside Out and Back Again five stars.

Margarita Engle's _The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist_

The Plot: Margarita Engle's verse novel The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist (2013), a 2014 Pura Belpre Honor Book, is a work of historical fiction based upon the life and writing of Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda (Tula) a poet, playwright, and novelist who lived from 1814-73. Avellaneda's boldest and most well-known work is Sab, "one of the world's first abolitionist novels and the earliest one written in Spanish. Sab is also the only known Latin American abolitionist novel that combines proemancipation views with feminist themes" (170). The Lightning Dreamer begins in 1827 when Tula is thirteen years old and is told from alternating viewpoints (including those of Tula, her younger brother Manuel, her mother, her maid Caridad, the Nuns whose library Tula often visits, the Orphans at the theater, and a young boy named Sab). The narrative follows Tula through 1836 when she is twenty-one years old and details her experiences on the marriage market, the blossoming of her passion for writing through discovery of Cuban Romantic poet Jose Maria Heredia's work, and her journey to Havana to write her novel.

The Poetry: Engle's verse novel is full of lyrical verse that combines imagery and metaphor to tell the story of a burgeoning young writer growing up in a time of oppression and injustice. At times Engle employs spare, rhymed verses in her narrative, such as: "I am alone / and my heart / is my own" (108). In other poems in the collection, Tula meditates upon the power of poetry's rhythms and silence: "I study verses with a drumbeat rhythm / like pounding music," "just as often, poetry is a free / dance / of birds in air," and "in each verse; / the stillness / between words" (45). Still other poems ask poignant questions about authenticity and the ethical implications of writing the story of injustices experienced by others:

Can a woman ever write

the true thoughts of a man?

...........................................

Can a free person

really understand one whose dreams

must fly up and soar

high above the depths

of slavery?

Is my imagination enough,

or do I need to add the ways

in which I myself

have felt enslaved? (162).

The Page: The Lightning Dreamer is divided into five parts: "Suns and Rays," "The Orphan Theater," "The Marriage Market," "See Me as I Am," and "The Hotel of Peace." The poems included in these sections are also book-ended by sections containing historical background and notes on the writing of Avellaneda and her mentor Heredia, as well as references. Engle also provides samples of poetry and prose written by both Avellaneda and Heredia in Spanish and with English translations.

Engle has written ten verse novels, several of which I have reviewed. The Lightning Dreamer is my favorite of Engle's verse novels for young readers. I give it five stars and highly recommend it.

Andrea Davis Pinkney's _A Poem for Peter_

The Plot: This week's picture book verse narrative is A Poem for Peter: The Story of Ezra Jack Keats and the Creation of The Snowy Day (2016) written by Andrea Davis Pinkney and illustrated by Lou Fancher and Steve Johnson. A Poem for Peter is a 40-page narrative poem. The narrative tells the story of Keats's family and birth, his early life and career, and the experiences that led him to create his most well-known work for young readers in 1962, The Snowy Day. Pinkney begins with Keats's parents, Polish immigrants who fled Warsaw in 1916 and settled in Brooklyn (9-10). From the age of eight, Keats knew he wanted to be an artist, and although his parents worried about his dream, they supported him in his education and art. Peter, the young protagonist of The Snowy Day, appears throughout the picture book in what Pinkney describes as "a 'peek-a-boo' fashion, waving at the reader, serving as a narrative thread that is stitched throughout" (49).

The Poetry: The long poem that makes up the pages of A Poem for Peter "employs a form known as 'collage verse,' 'bio-poem,' or 'tapestry narrative' in which factual components are layered with a mix of elements" (49). As Pinkney explains, "the use of a verse narrative to present Keats's life echoes Keats's use of collage to tell a story" (49). In addition to these formal attributes, Pinkney also employs anaphora, lyricism, rhythm, and rhyme to tell the story of Keats's life. For example, in the spread on pages 40-41, the reader sees Peter gazing out the window at the tops of buildings and a flock of birds. The last two stanzas on the page read:

Peter,

forging your path in knee-deep wonder.

Peter,

welcoming us into your play.

Peter,

marching out in a whole new way.

The final stanza is bolded for emphasis (as many are throughout the picture book): "With you, Ezra tore off the blinders. / Yanked up the shades. / Revealed the brilliance / of a brown-bright day" (41).

The Page: As Pinkney emphasizes in the end pages (which include a section on "Ezra's Legacy," "Keats, the Collage Poet," acknowledgements, and sources consulted for the creation of the book), Keats's choice to include a young African American child as the main character in his picture book in the early 1960s was groundbreaking: "as an artist who had grown up surrounded by poverty and anti-Semitism, Ezra understood what it was like to be excluded" (46). Pinkney further notes the reasons behind her enthusiasm for this project in her bio: "as an African American child growing up in the 1960s, at a time when I didn't see others like me in children's books, I was profoundly affected by the expressiveness of Keats's illustrations." A Poem for Peter is a complex and striking verse narrative that would pair nicely with The Snowy Day. I give it five stars.

Ashley Bryan's _Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life_

In honor of National Poetry Month, I will be posting two reviews each week during the month of April! One of my reviews each week will be focused on a picture book verse narrative. I have become more interested in the ways in which authors for children incorporate verse narratives into their writing beyond the novel form (picture books and shorter narrative poems). I have explored this in a few of my reviews previously. At the end of January the American Library Association announced the winners of the Youth Media Awards, and Ashley Bryan's picture book Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life (2016) was selected as a Newbery Honor Book, a Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book.

The Plot: Freedom Over Me is a collection of twenty-one poems in which Bryan imagines the lives and dreams of eleven slaves. Bryan explains in his author's note that the inspiration for this collection came when he "acquired a collection of slave-related documents... dated from the 1820s to the 1860s." The estate appraisement document that Bryan works from lists only the slaves' names and prices as they appear next to livestock and farm equipment. Bryan further notes: "My art and writing of this story aim to bring the slaves alive as human beings. I began by creating painted portraits of these eleven slaves. I studies each one, listening for their voices. I wrote what I heard in free verse to give emphasis to their words." The collection includes an introductory poem in the voice of Mrs. Mary Fairchilds, followed by a reproduction of the actual document upon which Bryan based the collection, and two poems written in the voice of ten of the eleven slaves listed in the document.

The Poetry: Bryan's free verse poems begin as primarily descriptive, with each character declaring her/his identity as a member of the Fairchilds' estate. Gradually, the poem expands the narrative behind the selling of the Fairchilds' estate. These poems employ lyricism and imagery to delve into the inner workings and longings of each character. For example, in the poem "John," the sixteen-year-old speaker describes himself as a "birthday gift" to Mrs. Fairchild, and the poem ends on his dream of freedom, "my thoughts of escaping / to freedom / grow stronger every day" and "Oh Freedom, Oh Freedom, / Oh Freedom over me!" According to the end pages, these last lines and the title of the collection come from the spiritual "Oh Freedom!": "which likely came into being soon after the end of slavery.... Like many African American spirituals, the song has more than one meaning, and was commonly sung as part of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s."

The Page: The visual elements of each page of the picture book are quite fascinating. Bryan juxtaposes a portrait of each slave with a collaged background of newspaper clippings, images, and handwritten legal documents. The facing page includes a poem titled after the name of the speaker of the poem ("Peggy") and usually appears on a dull-colored background. The next spread includes a poem on a brightly-colored background, entitled with the character's name and the word "dreams" ("Peggy dreams"). This poem is mirrored with a painting of the character engaged in an her/his artistry (whether cooking, carpentry, basket making, or painting). This painting often includes the character surrounding by individuals from his/her community.

Bryan's verse narrative is a beautifully constructed, and the poems together with the inclusion of an actual historical document come together to create a thoughtful addition to historical visual literature for young readers. I highly recommend Freedom Over Me and give it five stars. I also suggest Reading While White's spotlight on #ownvoices post on the book and the New York Times article "Black Lives Didn’t Matter: New Children’s Books Tell Slaves’ Real Stories" as companions to this picture book.

Kwame Alexander's "Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents: A Story-in-Verse"

The Plot: Kwame Alexander's "Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents: A Story-in-Verse" is the penultimate story the anthology Flying Lessons and Other Stories (2017) edited by the cofounder of We Need Diverse Books, Ellen Oh. Alexander pitched the work as a "novella-in-verse" or a "story-in-verse" on twitter the day before the book's release in early January. "Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents: A Story-in-Verse" is a 48-page series of poems about 12-year-old Monk. The series begins with the poem "How to Write a Memoir" which details why Monk begins writing his poems (159). The next poem in the series, a haiku, is entitled "Question About the Assignment" and underscores the unique aspect of this story-in-verse: "I know memoir is / based in fact, but can it have / a little fiction?" (160). The story goes on to detail how after a car accident, Monk develops the ability to read people's minds, and ultimately he uses his powers on Angel Carter, his crush, to impress her enough to maybe get her to go on a date with him.

The Poetry: Alexander's story-in-verse is told primarily in free verse, with the exception of one haiku, and another poem which includes a haiku stanza. In addition to these formal aspects, Alexander also employs rhyme and anaphora sporadically throughout the series, as well as imagery and space on the page. Overall, "Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents: A Story-in-Verse" is more focused on story than it is on poetic device, which makes sense for a shorter work. One aspect of Alexander's series that is particularly effective is his use of parenthetical aside in several of his poems. For example, in "How to Write a Memoir," Alexander uses five of these asides to develop the voice of his protagonist:

After reading

"Oranges"

by Gary Soto

(who I like)

Mr. Preston

(who I don't)

asks us

if we liked it

(which I did)

then makes us

write

(which I hate) (159).

The use of the short line and the parenthetical aside ask the reader to move more quickly and rhythmically through the poem and mirror Alexander's signature technique in his previous verse novels that focus on rhythm, linguistic play, and voice.

The Page: Like longer verse novels, Alexander's novella- or story-in-verse makes use of the space on the page, and among the nine other works in Flying Lessons and Other Stories, "Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents: A Story-in-Verse" takes up the most space in the collection. Alexander's use of this shorter form of the verse narrative is new and groundbreaking; perhaps many other verse novelists will turn to this shorter form as poetry and verse narratives become more popular in contemporary children's and YA literature.

You can listen to a soundcloud recording of Alexander reading his story HERE. I highly recommend "Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents: A Story-in-Verse" and the other nine stories in the collection. I give it five stars.

Jeannine Atkins's _Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science_

The Plot: Jeannine Atkins's Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science (2016) is a three-part novel in free verse that explores the lives of three real women: Maria Sibylla Merian, Mary Anning, and Maria Mitchell. Each narrative is roughly 60 pages in length, and explores the life of these young women from pre-teens through middle-age. Maria Merian's story begins when she is 13-years-old living in Frankfurt, Germany in 1660. Maria is the daughter of an artist, and she practices painting, but she is extremely fascinated by caterpillars and their metapmorphosis. Maria travels the country, painting these animals and learning about different types of caterpillars. Mary Anning's story begins when she is 11-years-old living in Lyme Regis, England in 1809. She works together with her father and then her older brother excavating stones on the seashore; unlike her father and brother, who simple chisel the fossils from the earth to sell, Mary is mesmerized by the patterns in the stones and the creatures from the past they discover. Maria Mitchell's story begins when she is 12-years-old living in Nantucket, Massachusetts in 1831. Maria's father is a mapmaker, who teaches her how to make star charts, use telescopes, and repair chronometers for sailors. Maria's family gives her a room of her own to do her work, and she eventually becomes the first female astronomy professor at one of the first colleges open to women, Vassar. Each of these narratives pushes forward into the next, demonstrating the ways in which women in science have advanced despite some of the restraints placed on them by their families, religious beliefs, and communities.

The Poetry: Finding Wonders utilizes lyrical free verse throughout, and the poems are rich with image, sound, and metaphor. For example, the poem "Metapmorphosis" in the first section of the book begins, "In a quiet revolution, Maria paints / on one piece of paper / first how a small egg breaks" (39), continues, "At last the cocoon breaks. / Pushing past sticky strands, / a fragile self unfurls," and finishes "Soft, moist, a moth fumbles / then unfolds four wings that flutter, / making her own faint applause" (40). In this poem, Atkins employs alliteration and the rhythm of soft vowel and consonant sounds. She also uses the caterpillars metamorphsis as a metaphor for Maria's own narrative of development as a young woman of science, pushing back against the suspicion her religious family has toward studying the natural world. Likewise, Mary's story uses metaphors of scientific and self discovery. In the poem "A Face in the Cliffs," Mary and her brother discover a huge fossil of a strange animal in the side of a cliff after their father and younger sibling's funerals. "After the rain, Mary walks by the sea, / which seems wide and empty. Pebbles clatter. / A gull drags its broken wing" (95); in these lines, Mary's feelings of loss and hopelessness are made manifest in the landscape by the speaker of the poem. Once they discover the creature, Mary's desire for knowledge is reignited: "She squeezes her hand, tastes salt on her tongue. / She'll scrape away stone. / Wonder doesn't have walls" (97).

The Page: Atkins's verse novel is divided into three distinct parts, "Mud, Moths, and Mystery," "Secrets in Stones," and "Many Stars, One Comet," and each section begins with an illustration of the young women its narrative charts and a prose paragraph titled "The ____'s Daughter" that locates the narrative in history and place. Interestingly, while each section begins by defining the young women by their father's professions, each of the narrative then turns this idea on its head by demonstrating the ways in which each young woman uses and moves forward from the knowledge she gains from her father. For example, in the last section, Maria's father is depicted as boasting about her accomplishment of locating a new comet, and the speaker notes "He enjoys introducing himself as Miss Mitchell's father" (178). The verse novel contains an author's note, a "reading past these pages" section, and a bibliography of sources.

Atkins's Finding Wonders is a beautifully written verse novel and the narrative is compelling. Atkins's purpose behind her narrative is to encourage young women's interest in the STEM fields and to bring recognition to female historical figures who helped to pave the way. Atkins's essay "Scrap by Scrap: Turning History into Poems" in which she explains her process would be a great pairing for this verse novel. I give her verse novel five stars, and I highly recommend it.

Nikki Grimes's _Garvey's Choice_

The Plot: Nikki Grimes's 2016 verse novel Garvey's Choice is a slim collection of poems, each of which uses the tanka form, to tell the story of a middle school boy named Garvey. Garvey desperately wants his father to see him. He is constantly teased because he is overweight, and his father laments the fact that he is more interested in books and music than in sports. He eats to fill the gap of loneliness, sadness, and longing to be seen as valuable just as he is by his father, his family, and his friends. Throughout the book, Garvey comes into contact with friends who encourage him and help him cope, including Manny, a boy who is passionate about cooking although his father thinks "that cooking is for girls" (62). Manny also has albinism and is picked on just like Garvey. Half-way through the collection, Garvey joins the chorus and finds his voice and a way to connect with his father through singing.

The Poetry: Grimes's verse novel is told entirely in the tank form. Tanka, as she explains in a section at the close of the book, is "an ancient poetry form, originally from Japan" (107). The tanka is five lines long, with each line adhering to a syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7. Grimes goes on to say that "traditional tanka poems focus on mood" and are "often poems about love, the four seasons, the shortness of life, and nature" (107). In addition to the use of the tanka form, Grimes also employs imagery, metaphor, and lyricism throughout her collection, and each of these poetic devices provides for greater emotional resonance for her narrative. For example, the poem "Phone Call" begins:

All evening long, I

try tucking in my sadness,

but it keeps getting

snagged on my voice when I speak (19).

In the poem, Garvey explains to his friend Joe about his desire to be seen by his father and to connect with him, but Joe response dismissively by saying, "I get it. Seriously. / But you've got a dad. / Mine skipped out long time ago" (19). In other poems, such as "Unique" Grimes uses Garvey's sadness and feelings of loneliness to bring up issues of the lack of diversity in literature for young people: "I search stories for someone / who resembles me" and "If it weren't for books and Joe, / "different" would just be lonely" (10).

The Page: Garvey's Choice is a short, but extremely impactful verse novel that utilizes poetic form and devices to tell a much needed story that addresses body image, cultural constructions of masculinity, bullying, and the black experience. I highly recommend Grimes's Garvey's Choice, and I give it five stars. If you are interested in the "story behind the story," you can read more about that from Grimes HERE.

Jacqueline Woodson's _Brown Girl Dreaming_

Published in 2014, Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming has been awarded the 2014 National Book Award for Young People, the 2015 Coretta Scott King Award, and was named a 2015 Newbery Honor Book. In the summer of 2015, Woodson was named the Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. On the Poetry Foundation's website, they note that this "title is given to a living writer in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. The laureate advises the Poetry Foundation on matters relating to young people’s literature and may engage in a variety of projects to help instill a lifelong love of poetry among the nation’s developing readers. This laureateship aims to promote poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians over the course of its two-year tenure." This week, I read Brown Girl Dreaming for the fifth time and taught it for the third semester in my Literature for the Intermediate Reader class at Western Michigan University. If you are interested in teaching Woodson's work, HERE is an activity that I use to open up my students' discussion of Brown Girl Dreaming. Each time I come to Woodson's work, I find something new, and it becomes a richer text for me.

The Plot: In Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson traces the experiences of her first person speaker Jackie (who is the representation of Woodson's childhood self). The narrative begins at her birth and describes what life was like growing up during the civil rights era in both the North and the South. Jackie's parents separate when she is an infant, and she travels from Ohio with her mother and siblings to live with her maternal grandparents in South Carolina. Eventually, her mother moves the family to Brooklyn, New York. In addition to the examination of racism through the eyes of a young person, Woodson also tackles issues of the broken family, religion, death and illness, imprisonment, and her experience with a learning disability. Brown Girl Dreaming is divided into five sections: "i am born," "the stories of south carolina run like rivers," "followed the sky's mirrored constellation to freedom," "deep i my hear, i do believe," and "ready to change the world." The poetry within these sections is further framed by a rich paratext; Woodson includes a family tree, an epigraph from Langston Hughes's poem "Dreams," a scrapbook collection of family photos, and an author's note.

The Poetry: Brown Girl Dreaming is told primarily in lyrical free verse but is interspersed with a series of eleven haiku. No matter what form she employs, Woodson's poetry reflects a deep meditation upon the historical and personal roots that helped shape her speaker as a writer. For example, the second poem in the collection, "second daughter's second day on earth," begins with the language of Jackie's birth certificate. The first three lines of the poem read: “My birth certificate says: Female Negro / Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro / Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro” (3). The repetition of the final word in each line, “Negro,” emphasizes its significance as a marker, and these first three lines take on the feel of a collaged legal document within the poem. The poem mixes the left justified historical and documentary style narrative with stanzas rich in voice and lyric that are centered and italicized: "I am born brown-skinned, black-haired and wide-eyed / I am born Negro here and Colored there" (3). This poem goes on to reference Dr. King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, and Rosa Parks as important figures who Jackie might model herself after as she grows up. This blending of personal and national history in the poem suggests Woodson’s desire to locate her story within and next to the stories of those individuals who profoundly transformed the world for brown children forever through their roles and their activism in the civil rights movement.

The Page: One theme that Woodson investigates in her memoir in verse is that of silence and blank space. Woodson has noted, “Memories don’t come back as straight narrative. They come in little bursts with white space all around them. It felt more realistic to write mine as poems.” The haiku series within Brown Girl Dreaming speaks volumes in its use of negative space. For example, the first haiku in the series, “how to listen #1” appears in part one of the verse novel entitled “i am born.” In the poem, memory, body, and emotion intertwine as a reflection of the early life of Jackie and her life in Columbus, Ohio with her mother, father, and siblings: “Somewhere in my brain / each laugh, tear and lullaby / becomes memory” (20). This poem encapsulates the drive of the entire collection—the focus of the narrative is remembering a history in order to gain insight into the self and understand the how personal and cultural history shapes an individual.

Brown Girl Dreaming is a gorgeous exploration of personal and national history. Woodson's use of lyricism, imagery, free verse, and haiku are distinct and moving. I give Brown Girl Dreaming five stars and highly recommend it.

Kwame Alexander's _The Crossover_

The Plot: Published in 2014, Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover was the winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. The story follows 12-year-old Josh Bell and his twin brother Jordan (JB) as they lead their middle school basketball team to their first county championship. Their father is a former Euroleague basketball player and their mother is the assistant principal at their middle school. The narrative begins with Josh feeling confident about his locks, his basketball skills, his friendship with his twin brother, and the idea of one day attending Duke University. Throughout the novel, which is divided into six sections (warm up, four quarters, and overtime), things begin to change in Josh’s life: his brother accidentally cuts off five of his locks and he must shave his head, JB gets his first girlfriend and Josh feels neglected, Josh gets suspended from the basketball team, and his family becomes more and more concerned about his father’s health.

The Poetry: Alexander’s verse novel utilizes multiple poetic forms (free verse, rap, concrete, tanka, ode) and devices (rhyme, rhythm, anaphora, lyricism, metaphor, simile) in order to focus on the strong family ties and the significance of language in the life of Josh Bell. Alexander uses free verse in a variety of different poems to push the narrative thread along. Additionally, several poems utilize rhyme and rhythm that mirrors rap or hip-hop lyrics, while others use concrete poetry and irregular font size and placement to emulate movements during basketball games.

The Page: Throughout the narrative, the poems make use of a variety of narrative modes including conversation poems, basketball rules, definition poems, text messages, play-by-plays, and newspaper articles. For example, in the definition poem “cross-o-ver,” the speaker of the poem, Josh, explains the meaning of this basketball term and how it relates to knowledge he has gathered from his education in language, his father, and professional basketball players he admires (29). In the final basketball rules poem in the novel, “Basketball Rule #10,” Josh meditates upon the year that has gone by: “A loss is inevitable, / like snow in winter. / True champions / learn / to dance / through / the storm” (230).

I found Alexander’s verse novel to be one of the best I have encountered thus far. Both the narrative and the use of poetry were compelling. I give The Crossover five stars and highly recommend it.