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.

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.