Sonya Sones's _Saving Red_

The Plot: Saving Red (2016) is Sonya Sones's sixth verse novel for young adults. Like her first verse novel, Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy (1999), Saving Red takes on the topic of mental illness; the protagonist, 14-year-old Molly, experiences severe anxiety and panic attacks, while other characters in the verse novel suffer from PTSD and schizoaffective disorder. A poem early in the collection provides insight into Molly's panic attacks: "I can't breathe...! // ... I'm having a heart attack! // But then Pixel's here--" (12). Pixel is Molly's service dog that accompanies her everywhere. The narrative begins cryptically alluding to the root of Molly's anxiety by referring to "the awful thing / that happened last winter" (26), but readers don't learn that "the awful thing" has something to do with her brother, Noah, until 163 pages into the narrative. Beyond exploring Molly's family and personal history with mental illness, the verse novel also examines Molly's encounter with a homeless youth named Red and her quest to reunite her with her family before the holidays.

The Poetry: Like many verse novels for young adults, Sones's work is a problem novel and is devoted primarily to narrative. Saving Red is over 400 pages and told in short, free verse poems. Sones's verse novel conforms to expectations readers of poetry might have about the way a collection should be presented (multiple stanzas, each poem titled, poems that are 1-3 pages in length). Each poem title runs into the poem, but beyond that, there is little attention to the ways poetry can use language and imagery to communicate to readers differently than traditional prose. The only poetic techniques evident in Sones's verse novel are her use of the space on the page and a sporadic simile. For example, in the poem "I suck in a Breath," the speaker describes feeling "something like / a steel plate // splitting / apart // deep inside / of me" (371). This is the closest Saving Red comes to a poetry that allows the reader to slow down or focus on language; this seems like a missed opportunity in the collection.

The Page: The end of the verse novel includes an acknowledgements and author's note section in which the author describes her own experiences of having a family member with a mental illness and how these experiences inspired her to write Saving Red. Overall, the most compelling part of Saving Red is the plot; I found the poetry to be pretty lackluster. I give it three stars.

Marie Jaskulka's _The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl and Random Boy_

The Plot: The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl and Random Boy (2015) is a collection of poems by Marie Jaskulka that alternate perspectives between Forgotten Girl, a 15-year-old high school sophomore who is dealing with her parents recent separation and her mother's depression and drinking problem, and Random Boy, an unemployed recent high school graduate who is also dealing with a troubled home life in which his alcoholic father physically abuses him and his mother. The verse novel's alternating perspectives are visualized through font; Forgotten Girl's poems are in standard font and Random Boy's poems are in italics. The narrative follows the development of the romantic relationship between Forgotten Girl and Random Boy, which very quickly moves from intense to abusive. Random Boy's desire to keep Forgotten Girl isolated from others and to become completely enmeshed with her intensifies after Forgotten Girl decides she wants to begin exploring a sexual relationship with him. Forgotten Girl begins to develop interest in another young man, who she gives the alias of Peter X in her notebook poems, and this further enrages Random Boy. Peter X takes hundreds of pictures of Forgotten Girl on his cell phone and creates photo collages for her. Forgotten Girl eventually realizes she is in an abusive relationship after Random Boy brutally beats Peter X after he tries to stand up for her. The narrative builds upon the legacy of Judy Blume's problem novels like Forever that confront taboo issues such as teen sexuality and romantic relationships and also follows in the footsteps of other verse novelists who use poetry to approach the problem novel such as Ellen Hopkins and Sonya Sones.

The Poetry: The most unique aspect of Jaskulka's verse novel is her use of multiple narrative view points to explore the intricacies of an intense teenage relationship and the way in which a physically and psychologically abusive romantic relationship can develop. The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl and Random Boy uses free verse poetry throughout and forefronts each teenage characters' use of the writer's notebook in order to explore their feelings, trauma history, and experiences. The author also utilizes lyricism, imagery, and metaphor in her poems. For example, each speaker uses the metaphor of notebook as body in order to emphasize the intimacies of both poetic exchange and romantic partnership. The poem "Even the Air" begins: "is different / after he's undressed / my notebook" (52), and later, the poem "View" continues that Forgotten Girl is never invited to Random Boy's house after the "day he opened / his notebook / to me" (65).

The Page: One of the biggest missed opportunities of Jaskulka's verse novel is the lack of framing provided to the reader in terms of the books exploration of abuse experienced by young people in romantic relationships. Not only does the author fail to mention this issue in her acknowledgement section or in an author's note, but the reviews of the book and Jaskulka's author website all fail to open a discussion of this topic or to be provide teens with resources if they are experiencing abuse in their own relationships. Instead, the reviews and dust jacket refer to the "dark story" and relationship as "frightening, but ultimately hopeful." I found this missing info within the pages of the book and the reviewers' discourse surrounding the relationship in the book problematic.

I give Jasulka's novel three stars and suggest using THIS interview with the author and the linked resources as a companion piece.

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!