Kwame Alexander's _Booked_

Earlier this year I reviewed Kwame Alexander's Newbery Medal winner The Crossover (2014). I highly recommend The Crossover, which incorporates some truly electric language and utilizes a variety of different formal approaches to tell a rich story that deals with family, grief, sports, and boyhood in an absolutely innovative way. Alexander's follow up to The Crossover, Booked (2016) is another groundbreaking verse novel that is sure to garner praise from young readers, librarians, educators, and scholars.

The Plot: Kwame Alexander's Booked follows eighth grader Nick Hall-- a wordsmith and avid soccer player-- as he navigates his first crush, his parents' separation, and his relationship with books. Alexander's verse novels have both portrayed highly professionalized parents; in The Crossover Josh's parents were a retired professional basketball player and an assistant middle school principal, and in Booked Nick's parents are a linguistics professor and a former horse racer turned trainer. The narrative begins with Nick daydreaming about soccer and feeling annoyed that his father makes him read a dictionary he wrote called Weird and Wonderful Words in preparation for college. As the narrative continues, the reader learns that in addition to playing soccer, Nick takes regular lessons at Miss Quattlebaum's School of Ballroom Dance and Etiquette (21), where he often gets to dance with April (the girl he has a crush on but is mostly too nervous to talk to). Early on in the narrative, Nick learns that his mother has decided to go back to work with horses in Kentucky and that his parents are separating (57). After learning this news, Nick becomes depressed; he has a hard time sleeping and begins to struggle in his classes. Nick struggles with his parents' separation throughout the novel, while also building up the courage to talk to April, playing against his best friend in soccer tournaments, dealing with being bullied, and resisting his honors English teacher's and his librarian's pleas for him to get more involved in reading because of his strength with words.

The Poetry: One of the most unique and fascinating things about Alexander's Booked is his use of erasure poetry, footnotes, acrostics, and intertextuality throughout. Towards the end of the verse novel, Nick begins to become immersed in literature for younger readers and joins a book club. He describes the experience of reading works like Karen Hesse's verse novel Out of the Dust and Jacqueline Woodson's Peace, Locomotion. In many ways, Booked takes on a pedagogical or didactic function in that it introduces readers to contemporary works for young readers and schools them in vocabulary. While acrostics, poems in which the first letter of a line spells out a word when read vertically, may seem like a commonplace poetic form for works for young readers, Alexander elevates this form by using unfamiliar words and then following up these poems with discussions of the word's meaning. For example the poem "April is" (114) utilizes an acrostic of the word "limerence," which means "the experience of being in love with someone" (119) to describe all of the characteristics he likes about April. When his English teacher asks him to find an example of a malapropism in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Nick creates an erasure poem from a page of the novel to show two malapropisms he found in the text (51). While Alexander's Booked does not contain the same level of electricity and playfulness in language as his previous work, The Crossover, Booked is innovative in its approach to form.

The Page: Footnotes are another inventive device that Alexander uses throughout Booked. While the footnote might be seen as academic, Nick utilizes them not only to define words, but also to provide his own commentary on the words. For example, in the poem "Busted," Nick's footnote reads: "*malapropism [mal-uh-prop-iz-uhm] noun: the amusing and ludicrous misuse of a word, especially by confusion with one of a similar sound. Here's an example: my English teacher, Ms. Hardwick, is a wolf in cheap clothing" (18).

I found Alexander's new verse novel Booked to be a fascinating and fun read. I give it four stars and highly recommend it.

An Introduction to the Verse Novel Review

Welcome to The Verse Novel Review! This blog features my reviews, critical perspectives, analysis, and exploration of the verse novel for young readers as a literary form. I am a children's and young adult literature scholar and educator who studies form in contemporary American poetry, comics, and realistic fiction.

I first became interested in the verse novel as a form while I was completing my MFA in Poetry. I read hundreds of children's, young adult, and adult verse novels and even experimented with writing my own verse novel. Throughout my research and writing process, I was most struck by the fact that although this form has deep historical roots and has been utilized by many contemporary adult writers (such as Anne Carson, Rita Dove, Marilyn Hacker, Derek Walcott, and Seth Vikram), the form has emerged strongly in literature for young readers from the 1990s onward. Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust was the first verse novel for young readers to win the Newbery Medal in 1998, and Virginia Euwer Wolff's True Believer and Thanhha Lai's Inside Out and Back Again each won the National Book Award for their verse novels in 2001 and 2011, respectively. Most recently, verse novels such as Kwame Alexander's The Crossover and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming have been awarded top honors by the Newbery Medal Selection Committee and the National Book Award panel. Beyond awards and honors, verse novels for young readers have also emerged as a form extremely popular with young people. Verse novels by Ellen Hopkins, Margarita Engle, David Levithan, Sonya Sones, Sharon Creech, Helen Frost, among others can regularly be found in stock at large chain bookstores.

Further research into the critical opinion about the verse novel for young readers uncovered a general feeling of suspicion and distaste for the form (see the bibliography of critical perspectives page on this blog, noting critical commentary from the panel for The Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry in 2005, 2009, and 2014). Critics have debated about whether there is any poetry in the verse novel and whether the form merits serious critical consideration. This led me to wonder: Why the verse novel? What is the verse novel? Why have authors for young readers found the form useful to communicate to and about children in the twentieth and twenty-first century? Why have critics of verse novels for young readers found the form lacking at times? What makes the verse novel for young readers a valuable form? I hope to use this blog as a way to open up a dialogue about the form and to begin answering these questions. I also hope to use this blog as a place to begin tracking, organizing, categorizing, and recognizing patterns in the production, consumption, and content of the verse novel for young readers.

Although many have defined the verse novel, it is not only scholars, but also readers, authors, and publishers who help determine what makes a book a verse novel. What makes the verse novel unique is its hybrid form, a form that combines elements of poetry, prose, and even drama (see Mike Cadden's "The Verse Novel and the Question of Genre" for more on this idea). I define the verse novel as a series of poems linked by a central narrative thread. Furthermore, because of the strong connection between children's and young adult literature and participatory culture, I argue that if a publisher, author, scholar, or reader identifies a work as a verse novel, it is a verse novel.

The verse novel as a form is significant in that, in both children's and adult literature, it has a literary history and tradition that dates back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Since the late 1990s, the verse novel has reemerged within both children's and adult literature, marking an important shift in the way in which we view contemporary poetry. The verse novel, in its unique hybrid construction, opens up a space for young readers and educators to come to contemporary poetry without feeling overwhelmed. The verse novel presents itself as an accessible form, and quite often reveals much depth and complexity through its language and craft.

So welcome to the blog! You can look forward to my posts weekly. I will be reviewing a new verse novel for young readers each week beginning with those published most recently in 2014 and 2015, with an occasional post about what I will call "genealogical" works from 1990 through 2013. I will provide discussion of elements of the plot, the poetry, and the page, as well as note my rating on a five-star scale system. Cheers to a new year full of verse novels!