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.

Madeleine Kuderick's _Kiss of Broken Glass_

The Plot: Madeleine Kuderick's 2014 YA verse novel, Kiss of Broken Glass, follows fifteen-year-old Kenna Keagan during her 72 hour stay at Adler Boyce Pediatric Stabilization Facility after she is "Baker Acted" (1) when a classmate catches her cutting in the bathroom at school. The poems in the narrative are told in second person (you) point of view, and over the course of three days,the reader steps into the shoes of Kenna as she makes friends at Adler, attends group therapy, and prepares for her family to attend a group session before she is released. Kuderick's work is most certainly a traditional YA problem novel, and much like Ellen Hopkins's Crank Series, the reader discovers in the author's note that the author was inspired to write the book after her own daughter's struggle with cutting and experience of being "involuntarily committed under Florida's Baker Act" (203).

The Poetry: While the author strives to utilize memorable imagery and crisp language that hold the reader in the narrative, ultimately most of it falls flat and reads as cliche or inauthentic. At times the imagery and lyricism work well; for example in the poem "By the Time My Mother Leaves," the speaker describes her urge to cut using simile, alliteration, and anaphora: "The way the blood pools warm at first / then cools like morning dew on slivered skin" and "The way the crimson dances 'round the bowl / then trickles tiny teardrops down the drain" (100-101). Beyond the poetry used to describe Kenna's experiences, one of the characters that she befriends, Skylar (who is also a cutter and is struggling with anorexia) also writes poetry which she passes to Kenna.

The Page: Throughout the narrative, almost every poem title includes one word with multiple strike-throughs obscuring it; this is one of the somewhat gimmicky things that Kuderick's Kiss of Broken Glass engages in that contributes to the at times tired approach to the topic of cutting. The author does include an author's note and a list of resources for young readers who might be struggling with self-harm themselves.

Overall, I found Kuderick's Kiss of Broken Glass to be a fine verse novel. It approaches the problem novel in a way that is becoming common-place with the verse novel form and strives to employ poetic technique while doing so. I give it three stars.

Leza Lowitz's _Up From The Sea_

The Plot: Up From the Sea (2016) by Leza Lowitz tells the story of seventeen-year-old Kai, a Japanese American boy living in the Tohuku region of Honshu, Japan and his experience of surviving the March 2001 earthquake and tsunami that devastated his community. The verse novel begins with a preface detailing the particulars of the tragedy and then immediately immerses the reader in Kai's experiences the morning of the earthquake and tsunami. Kai loses his mother and grandparents, as well as his home, but as the months go on he comes to terms with his loss. Deciding he wants to seek out his father, who he hasn't seen in many years, he travels to New York with a group of survivors to meet with other young people who lost their parents on September 11th when hijacked planes were crashed into the World Trade Center. After Kai fails to locate his father in New York, he returns to Japan and focuses his energy on creating a soccer team in his town and teaching young people the sport he loves.

The Poetry: Lowitz's verse novel is told in free verse with short, choppy lines. It was disappointing that in an almost-300-page verse novel, Lowitz included very little poetic technique, and what was used was not impactful. The short lines, which often included a single word per line for an entire poem, seemed gimmicky after a few pages. Like other verse novels that I've discussed on this blog, Up From The Sea does not follow the standard poetic practice of only having one poem on each page, and this contributes to a lack of space for reader contemplation (which in my estimation is one of the most significant features of the verse novel form). The poem "When I Wake Up," which includes lines referencing the collection's title, was maybe the only example of a poem that utilized the short line in a way that was meaningful; this poem also makes use of rhyme, but overall the poem could have held more weight if it were placed on its own page. There were a few moments of imagery, but these were very few and far between. For example, one such instance occurs early on in the poem "March 11--" when the speaker of the poem describes his community: "Shin's dad washed his taxi in their garage, / bleached the seat covers white as bone" (4). While the second line uses a simile to begin to create some imagery, most of the collection follows the first line in that it focuses on tired descriptions with little detail or language play. The lack of imagery and lyricism, as well as the inability of the author to fully develop her character or landscape made this a tough work to get through.  

The Page: The narrative is divided into three seasons: "Spring," "Summer," and "Fall," and each season has sections of poems within it that use alliterative titles, such as, "Adrift," "Amidst," "Ashore," "Ascend," and so on. Many pages also include footnotes that define and explain Japanese terms. For instance, on page 4 the reader learns that "Obaachan" and "Ojichan" mean grandma and grandpa, respectively, and on page 79 a note explains that "natsukashii" means an "expression of a feeling of nostalgia or fondness when experiencing something for the first time in a long time."

Overall, Lowitz's Up From the Sea seemed like a missed opportunity in both narrative and poetic craft. While the verse novel's topic seemed of interest, the author was unable to use the form or narrative content to create a work that stood out. I give Up From The Sea two stars.