Laura Shovan's _The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary_

The Plot: Laura Shovan's 2016 debut The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary is a polyvocal verse novel that includes the voices of the eighteen students in Ms. Hill's fifth grade class during a transformative school year. At the end of the year, the crumbling school will be closed and bulldozed to make way for a shopping center. The verse novel explores this event through the eyes of each individual student. Ms Hill tasks the students in her class with keeping a poetry journal; their poems will go into a time capsule at the end of the year.

The Poetry: Each poem in the collection includes the date, the name and illustrated head shot of the student writing the poem,  and a title. The eighteen diverse characters within the verse novel who write poems include: Sydney, Rennie, Tyler, Norah, Rachel, Sloane, Mark, Ben, Katie, Gaby, Brianna, Edgar, Newt, George, Jason, Hannah, Shoshanna, and Rajesh. Their concerns run the gamut from having a mother deployed in the armed forces, to having a crush on a classmate, to a death in the family. The poetry within The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary strives to represent many forms and a multitude of content, but ultimately much of it is uninteresting and the eighteen viewpoints make it difficult for the author to flesh out characters. One interesting move the author makes involves her inclusion of Spanish poems writeen by Gaby and their translation by another student in the class, Mark, on the facing page. This use of translation in Shovan's verse novel is lost though in the multitude of perspectives and thematic concerns.

The Page: The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary is divided into four sections, each named for a different quarter of the school year. The poems within the collection allow for one poem per day during the school year. Shovan includes a lengthly section at the end of her verse novel that includes "A Closer Look at the Poems in This Book," which explains how the persona poems work throughout the collection; "Favorite Forms From Room 5-H," which includes a list and definitions of each of the forms used in the verse novel from acrostics, concrete poems, and haiku to free verse poems, found poems, and odes; "Form the Fifth-Grade Poetry Prompt Jar," that lists several ideas for beginning writing poetry; and a glossary. Much of the work of this verse novel is pedagogical, and I can see Shovan and/or her publishers envisioning this work being used in the classroom. Ultimately, though, this work falls short in both poetry and plot. I give Shovan's The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary two stars.

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.