Sharon Creech's _Moo: A Novel_

The Plot: Sharon Creech's (2016) verse novel Moo: A Novel tells the story of twelve-year-old Reena. Reena moves with her younger brother, Luke, and her parents from the big city to Maine, where they encounter an old woman named Mrs. Falala. Mrs. Falala owns a farm and a stubborn cow named Zora. After a few strange meetings with Mrs. Falala, Reena and Luke's parents volunteer them to work on the farm helping Mrs. Falala clean and care for Zora the cow and her other farm animals. While Reena and Luke are at first skeptical and even scared of the old woman and her cow, they eventually grow quite fond of her. Luke, an avid drawer, spends time teaching Mrs. Falala to draw, while Reena works diligently to train Zora. With the help of a young man named Zep, Reena begins to train to show Zora at the county fair. The novel ends with Reena and Zora's first time showing at the fair, and an unexpected twist involving Mrs. Falala.

The Poetry: Creech's verse novel follows her previous work in this form, Love That Dog (2001), Hate That Cat (2008), and Heartbeat (2004), in that it uses free verse  throughout the narrative, in addition to concrete poetry and varied typography in several poems. Despite the fact that in Moo the emphasis is most often placed upon the narrative arc, instead of poetic devices and techniques, Creech does use the broken line, white space, and typographical variances in order to emphasize the significance of particular moments in the narrative and to encourage the reader to spend more time on the page. For example, in the poem "Back to Twitch Street," Creech uses imagery and typography to create a distinct picture in the reader's mind of life on the farm:

with the open attic window

and the

           f  l  u  t  e     m  u  s  i  c

                       drift

                               ing

                                     d

                                     o

                                     w

                                     n (61)

In this excerpt from "Back to Twitch Street," Reena and Luke return to the farm after riding their bikes through pastures and past views of the ocean. They are truly captivated by the scenes of the country after growing up in the city. Throughout the narrative, Reena and Luke are captivated the the flute music they hear Mrs. Falala playing from her attic window. They never seen her play, but they come to learn that her flute music and attic space help her practice "remembering."

The Page: The 74 poems that make up Creech's verse novel Moo trace the experiences of pre-teen Reena as she moves from the city to the country and transforms from an indoor girl to an outdoor girl. Creech's Moo was a fine verse novel that represents a growing trend in the blend of free verse, prose sections, and concrete poetry in the verse novel for middle grade readers. I give Moo three stars.

Skila Brown's _To Stay Alive: Mary Ann Graves and the Tragic Journey of the Donner Party_

The Plot: Skila Brown's 2016 To Stay Alive: Mary Ann Graves and the Tragic Journey of the Donner Party is a historical verse novel that explores the life and experiences of nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Graves, a real-life settler who traveled with her family, the Donner family, and several other families across the country to reach California in the 1840s. Brown bases her narrative on historical records and research to tell a particularly compelling story of a young woman's survival in a time of hardship, chaos, and ultimately horror. The nearly 300-page verse novel takes place over the course of one year, beginning in the spring of 1846 and ending in the spring of 1847. Mary Ann travels from Lacon, Illinois with her family which includes her mother, father, older married sister, three younger brothers, four younger sisters, and a hired teamster named John. Mary Ann is a quilter and a strong young woman who likes to speak her mind.

The Poetry: Brown's To Stay Alive is primarily comprised of free verse poems that make use of rich imagery, lyricism, and the space on the page, but the verse novel also includes a few concrete poems that take the shape of what they describe or allude to in the poem. For instance, the poem on page 3, "Father" is shaped like a sphere on the page and describes Mary Ann's father as "burning like the sun" and "itching" to leave on their journey. Likewise, the poem "Inside the Wagon" spreads single words across the space of the page drawing attention to the fact that riding inside the wagon is bumpy: "never still never / smooth / always bump shake rattle" (41). While these poems were interesting in terms of form and content, the poem that I found most moving and rhythmic was the final poem in the collection, "A New Quilt." This nine-page poem shows Brown's skill in the long lyric poem, something that I have yet to see many verse novelists for young readers do well. In "A New Quilt" Brown uses anaphora, lyricism, imagery, and a rhythmic line that mimics the work of quilting to tell the last bits of Mary Ann's narrative. The repeated refrains "I'm stitching / a new quilt" at the beginning of stanzas and "I stitch" justified to the right side of the page at the end of many lines become a place of meditation for the reader as she considers the ways that Mary Ann copes with her loss of many of her family members.

The Page: In addition to being divided into five sections that reflect the seasonal changes, Brown's verse novel also contains a variety of paratextual documents to aid the reader in understanding the historical time period and Brown's research process. The front papers include an article from The Lacon Home Journal announcing that a local family is headed to the west, as well as a two-page map spread that provides the path that Mary Ann's family followed. The end papers include an epilogue, an author's note, a photograph of the real Mary Ann Graves, a list of individuals who were part of the Donner party divided into families with their ages and survival status listed, and an acknowledgments section. Her website also includes an educational guide to pair with the verse novel and a variety of blog posts with more details about the Donner party.

I found Brown's To Stay Alive to be a surprisingly engaging narrative. While the subject matter (cannibalism) initially made me wary of the author's ability to tackle such a topic in a new way, Brown was able to skillfully and successfully weave Mary Ann's story together through her use of lyric poetry. To Say Alive was a page-turner. I give it four stars and highly recommend it.

Holly Bodger's _5 to 1_

The Plot: Holly Bodger's 2015 verse novel 5 to 1 is a polyvocal dystopian narrative that tells the story of Sudasa and Kiran, a teenage girl and boy growing up in India in the year 2054. After years of the government's one-child policy, there are five boys for every one girl in the country; fed up with the commodification of girls, a group of women found a new country called Koyanagar. In Koyanagar, girls are also highly prized, but the government sets up a series of seven tests so that every boy, no matter how rich or poor, has the opportunity to "win" a wife. Sudasa, the middle sister in a wealthy family, does not want to be a wife, although her grandmother with a high ranking position in the government is set on using her marriage as a way to pay a debt she owes. When Sudasa realizes her marriage contest has been rigged (as her cousin is one of the competitors, given an edge by her grandmother), she becomes determined to subvert the tests in some way. Kiran, or contestant five as he is referred to throughout most of the narrative, is a poor farmer boy from the coast. He does not want to be married either, and he has a plan to use the tests to his advantage as well, but finds that he feels a connection with Sudasa that he did not expect.

The Poetry: Bodger's verse novel alternates perspectives and styles; Sudasa's chapters are in verse, while Kiran's chapters are in prose. Like many other verse narratives, Bodger's utilizes the manipulation of space and the gaps created by line breaks to encourage a slowing of narrative pace and reader contemplation. Bodger also makes use of anaphora, variations in typography, strikethrough/underline/bold text, and arrows. Each of these elements draws attention to the words on the page and enacts many of the features of more standard visual or concrete poetry. At times these poetic techniques can seem gimmicky. One of the stronger poetic devices that Bodger uses is the reference to William Blake. Sudasa is depicted as a lover of poetry and she and her father often quote Blake. For example in the final poem, "34," Sudasa's father speaks to her in code using a quote from Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a text that mixes poetry, prose, and image: "Remember, beti,/ no bird soars too high,/ if he soars with his own wings" (236). Her father then follows up with a secret message to help Sudasa make a decision about her future: "And sometime, when wings burn,/ they rise from the ash/ as fins in turn" (237). Blake's exploration of contraries and his insistence upon the necessity of both in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is interestingly reflected in Bodger's verse novel about the two extremes of the prizing of boys vs. the prizing of girls in culture.

The Page: 5 to 1 is organized into three parts, each part representing a day of the tests. Each part is then further separated into chapters that explore the narrative from Sudasa and Kiran's point of view. Each chapter includes a varying illustration that depicts an image of a woman/fish hybrid, and each part includes an illustrated image of a pair of hands with mehndi or henna designs (typically applied to women's hands during Hindu wedding ceremonies) featuring the same woman/fish hybrid.

I found 5 to 1 to be an interesting read, and it is one of the first ever dystopian verse novels I have encountered. I give it three stars.

Chris Crowe's _Death Coming Up the Hill_

The Plot: Chris Crowe's 2014 verse novel Death Coming Up the Hill is set in 1968 and tells the story of seventeen-year-old Ashe. Ashe has a troubled home life: his father is conservative, dogmatic, and racist and his mother is a passionate anti-war and civil rights activist. Although his parents do not like, let along love, each other, they make it clear to Ashe that he is the only reason they got married and have stayed together. Adding another complexity to Ashe's experience, he is getting ready to graduate and is seriously concerned about the draft and the Vietnam war. Ashe plans to go to college, with the help of his father's tuition money, in order to avoid being drafted. But when his mother becomes pregnant after forming a relationship with a man at an anti-war meeting and gives birth to a biracial child, Ashe's father leaves and threatens to withdraw Ashe's tuition money if he doesn't come to live with him. Ashe does experience some respite at school where he enjoys his US history class and spending time with his girlfriend, Angela, whose brother is serving in Vietnam.

The Poetry: One of the most unique aspects of Crowe's verse novel is its form. It consists of poems made up of a series of 976 haiku, one syllable for each of the 16,592 American soldiers who died in Vietnam in 1968. Crowe's verse novel is a meditation on the number 17: a prime number, the number of syllables in a haiku, the age of his protagonist, the birthday of his protagonist (May 17), and a number when multiplied by 976 equals the 1968 death toll. Crowe use of the haiku throughout his collection is effective in focusing the reader on breath and pause. According to Crowe, the final two stanzas of the last poem in the collection are inspired by "an American soldier's letter written shortly before he died in the assault on Hamburger Hill in May 1969" (199) and the verse novel takes its title from these final lines: "I see Death coming / up the hill, and I am not / ready to meet him" (197). This final haiku embodies the spirit of the narrative as a whole and of the haiku as a formal approach in general, with its focus on the natural landscape, the speaker's individual experience of his/her surroundings, and the meditation upon the quotidian.

The Page: Each poem in Death Coming Up the Hill begins with the date and the number of lives lost in the war during the preceding week. Ashe explains that this number is a figure that his US history teaching puts up on the board every day; Crowe explains in his historical and author's notes in the back of the book that the Thursday edition of daily newspapers during this time period published the death count, which ultimately "so commonplace that many Americans barely noticed them" (201). Crowe notes in his author's note that he "wanted his main character to notice and become fascinated by the death counts as he gained an awareness of the troubled world around him" (201).

I found Crowe's verse novel to be an interesting exercise in the use of form throughout a collection, but at times the didacticism of the narrative was a bit over the top. I give it three stars.

Linda Oatman High's _A Heart Like Ringo Starr_

The Plot: Linda Oatman High's 2015 A Heart Like Ringo Starr tells the story of 17-year-old Faith Hope Stevens who is awaiting a heart transplant. Faith, who has been sick since she was born, is home-schooled, and her family runs a funeral home, so death seems to always be a part of her life. The narrative follows Faith through her experience of being on the transplant list, to discovering that she will receive a heart transplant, to her life with a new heart and the uncertainties and surprises that arise from this transition in her life. Before her transplant, Faith is depicted as cynical, and she expects that it is not just a matter of if she will die but when. After she receives a new heart, she feels unsure of who she is and longs to have her old, defective heart back. Faith starts her senior year at high school (it is not as exciting as she thought it would be and she feels on-display and invisible at the same time), and she meets a young man while at the beach with her great aunt. The narrative moves surprisingly quickly through each of these events and has a closed, happily-ever-after ending.

The Poetry: Throughout the verse novel, Oatman High utilizes a significant amount of end and internal rhyme, as well as a considerable amount of white space. These two poetic techniques seem at odds with each other throughout the collection. The use of rhyme speeds the narrative up, which seems to contradict the serious subject matter. The white space created by the use of short lines, half-blank page, and alternatively left and right justified text might usually act as a method to slow the reader's pace in verse novels, while in A Heart Like Ringo Starr these techniques juxtaposed with the extensive use of rhyme and the sporadic changes in typography do not seem as purposeful. For example, in the poem "Wintertime," three four to five line stanzas include only one to five words and the facing page leave the top half of the page blank and includes two similarly short stanzas that end the poem:

Bummer.

I so

want summer.

Popsicles.

Not icicles.

This pedicure tickles

                                 my

                                         toes (9).

This use of rhyme and space on the page does little in terms of narrative work or linguistic play, and ultimately the poem falls flat. Other poems such as the title poem, "A Heart Like Ringo Starr" (91), are on the verge of successfully exploring a character's thoughts and feelings with rhyme, rhythm, and lyricism, but in the end the poem is less impactful because of the author's choice of line length and use of white space.

The Page: A Heart Like Ringo Starr is divided into two parts that follow Faith before and after her transplant. As previously noted, the poems make use of white space and typography play. It seems that the author made some of her choices because she sees her work appealing to "reluctant readers." This argument for the use of white space and short lines as inviting to readers because less appears on the page seems to be a mistake and a view that doesn't take young readers seriously as an audience. Ultimately, white space and poetic language within a verse novel are most successful when they encourage a reader to slow down and meditate upon the narrative, emotion, and meaning.

I give Oatman High's verse novel two stars.

Marilyn Nelson's _American Ace_

The Plot: Marilyn Nelson's 2016 verse novel (or as she terms it, lyric history) American Ace follows 16-year-old Connor as he discovers his geneaology and his family's connection to American history. When his Italian grandmother, Nonna Lucia dies, she leaves Connor's father a letter explaining that the man who raised him is not his father. Connor's father becomes depressed upon learning this news, and it isn't until he begins to teach Connor to drive that the "glacier... growing between" them begins to melt (15). During their driving practice sessions, Connor's father divulges the contents of Nonna Lucia's letter, they begin to have a discussion about identity and belonging (19). Connor's father tells his extended family the news shortly after and all of them are interested in the romance of being a "love child" (27). In addition to the letter, Nonna Lucia also left a gold class ring that belonged to Connor's biological grandfather. Connor and his father use these two artifacts to begin discovering their family history. After doing lots of research with a local librarian and having Connor's father's DNA tested, Connor and his father discover that Nonna Lucia's lover went to Wilberforce University, which was the first HBCU (historically black colleges and universities) in the United States, and was a Tuskegee Airman, a group of famous all-black fighter pilots in WWII. Shortly after discovering all of this, Connor's father has a stroke, and while he is working through rehab and recovery, Connor continues researching the Tuskegee Airman and writes about them for his senior US History Honors Thesis.

The Poetry: Nelson is well known for her poetry for both young readers and adult readers. This work follows her recent publication of How I Discovered Poetry (which I reviewed earlier this year) and is her ninth verse novel/lyric history. Like How I Discovered Poetry, which is a series of 50 sonnets, in American Ace, Nelson utilizes a consistent stanza form and meter throughout with each of her 45 poems consisting of two 12-line stanzas in loose blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). In addition to these formal constructions, Nelson also uses lyricism (as her categorization of her work as a lyric history implies) throughout to focus her attention on the emotions experienced by a teenage boy learning about his family history and dealing with his father's illness. For example, in the poem "Beginning," which is the second poem in part nine, Connor meditates on how he coped while his father was recovering from his stroke:

The hours I'd spent watching Dad mend his brain:

they were the only ones that held meaning.

Those, and the hours I'd spent discovering

the Tuskegee Airman, that brotherhood

of brothers. (109) 

The Page: American Ace is divided into nine parts, and each part contains five poems. Nelson also includes several photographic images depicting the Tuskegee Airman (86, 90-91, 100, 119) and an author's note entitled "How This Book Came to Be, and Why an Older African American Woman Ended Up Writing as a Young White Man" (120). Nelson also uses another interesting formal approach in parts seven and eight. While the poems in these two sections make up Connor's honor thesis entitled "Discovering the Tuskegee Airmen," each of the poem titles alludes to the stages of Connor's father's recovery ("Acute Care," "Rehab," "Daily Visits," etc.).

I thoroughly enjoyed Nelson's newest verse novel and its approach to lyric history as a poetic form. I give American Ace four stars.

Marilyn Hilton's _Full Cicada Moon_

The Plot: Marilyn Hilton's Full Cicada Moon (2015) takes place in 1969 and follows twelve-year-old Mimi Yoshiko Oliver as she moves from Berkeley, California to Hillsborough, Vermont with her mother and father. Mimi faces a multitude of struggles in her new town and at her new school, and most of these dilemmas are centered around the fact that she is biracial: her mother is Japanese and her father is black. In addition to the blatant and covert racism Mimi experiences, she also experiences sexist attitudes from her school administrators and teachers when she expresses interest in taking wood shop class instead of home economics. Beyond these already complex topics, Full Cicada Moon also explores a wide variety of conflicts. Mimi's family has a neighbor who is unfriendly, which the reader later learns has to do with his prejudice toward Japan after serving in WWII as a pilot. Mimi's mother is struggling to adjust to life without her relatives from California nearby. Mimi makes a friend whose mother does not like that she is part-black; this friend later wants to date a "boy with an afro" in their class, which she hides from her racist mother. Mimi wants to be an astronaut when she grows up and is fascinated by the Apollo 11 mission and the moon. She follows her passion and creates a science project about the moon's phases, and just when it seems that her project will win the school science fair, someone vandalizes her work. There are several school dances (where fights occur or where Mimi feels left out), Mimi befriends her rude neighbor's nephew and begins to have romantic feelings for him, and Mimi experiences a variety of racist attitudes and remarks from various townspeople and her schoolmates. This is a lot for one text to take on, which makes sense given the book's 400 pages.


The Poetry: While a lot happens in the novel, and the author approaches and successfully tackles some taboo topics, the one thing that was most lacking in Full Cicada Moon was the use of sustained poetic technique. In fact, in 400 pages, there were only a few poems that employed any poetic devices at all. The narrative is told in free verse poems, but the poems lack imagery, lyricism, and music. This lack of poetic technique is acceptable, so long as the author endeavors to utilize the space of the page to create pauses or to draw the reader's attention to linger on a scene. Hilton's verse novel was really more of a soliloquy, where the main focus was on the story and the voice and musings of the speaker (see Mike Cadden's "The Verse Novel and the Question of Genre" for an in-depth discussion of the ways in which the verse novel utilizes dramatic techniques). The one poetic device that Full Cicada Moon does employ every so often is the use of concrete or visual poetry (words arranged on the page to imply movement) and the em-dash (for emphasis and pause at the end of a line).

The Page: Full Cicada Moon is divided into parts that focus on the seasons of the first full year of Mimi's life in Vermont. Several poem titles also emphasize Japanese cultural traditions or follow the phases of the moon. The book includes a glossary of Japanese words, epigraphs from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Neil Armstrong, and an author's acknowledgement page that details how Mimi's narrative came to her and the research she did for the novel.

Overall, the narrative of Full Cicada Moon was interesting, but the book was far too long and filled with too many side-narratives, and the under-utilization of poetic techniques and devices seemed like a missed opportunity. I give Full Cicada Moon three stars.

Jacqueline Woodson's _Brown Girl Dreaming_

Published in 2014, Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming has been awarded the 2014 National Book Award for Young People, the 2015 Coretta Scott King Award, and was named a 2015 Newbery Honor Book. In the summer of 2015, Woodson was named the Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. On the Poetry Foundation's website, they note that this "title is given to a living writer in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. The laureate advises the Poetry Foundation on matters relating to young people’s literature and may engage in a variety of projects to help instill a lifelong love of poetry among the nation’s developing readers. This laureateship aims to promote poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians over the course of its two-year tenure." This week, I read Brown Girl Dreaming for the fifth time and taught it for the third semester in my Literature for the Intermediate Reader class at Western Michigan University. If you are interested in teaching Woodson's work, HERE is an activity that I use to open up my students' discussion of Brown Girl Dreaming. Each time I come to Woodson's work, I find something new, and it becomes a richer text for me.

The Plot: In Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson traces the experiences of her first person speaker Jackie (who is the representation of Woodson's childhood self). The narrative begins at her birth and describes what life was like growing up during the civil rights era in both the North and the South. Jackie's parents separate when she is an infant, and she travels from Ohio with her mother and siblings to live with her maternal grandparents in South Carolina. Eventually, her mother moves the family to Brooklyn, New York. In addition to the examination of racism through the eyes of a young person, Woodson also tackles issues of the broken family, religion, death and illness, imprisonment, and her experience with a learning disability. Brown Girl Dreaming is divided into five sections: "i am born," "the stories of south carolina run like rivers," "followed the sky's mirrored constellation to freedom," "deep i my hear, i do believe," and "ready to change the world." The poetry within these sections is further framed by a rich paratext; Woodson includes a family tree, an epigraph from Langston Hughes's poem "Dreams," a scrapbook collection of family photos, and an author's note.

The Poetry: Brown Girl Dreaming is told primarily in lyrical free verse but is interspersed with a series of eleven haiku. No matter what form she employs, Woodson's poetry reflects a deep meditation upon the historical and personal roots that helped shape her speaker as a writer. For example, the second poem in the collection, "second daughter's second day on earth," begins with the language of Jackie's birth certificate. The first three lines of the poem read: “My birth certificate says: Female Negro / Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro / Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro” (3). The repetition of the final word in each line, “Negro,” emphasizes its significance as a marker, and these first three lines take on the feel of a collaged legal document within the poem. The poem mixes the left justified historical and documentary style narrative with stanzas rich in voice and lyric that are centered and italicized: "I am born brown-skinned, black-haired and wide-eyed / I am born Negro here and Colored there" (3). This poem goes on to reference Dr. King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, and Rosa Parks as important figures who Jackie might model herself after as she grows up. This blending of personal and national history in the poem suggests Woodson’s desire to locate her story within and next to the stories of those individuals who profoundly transformed the world for brown children forever through their roles and their activism in the civil rights movement.

The Page: One theme that Woodson investigates in her memoir in verse is that of silence and blank space. Woodson has noted, “Memories don’t come back as straight narrative. They come in little bursts with white space all around them. It felt more realistic to write mine as poems.” The haiku series within Brown Girl Dreaming speaks volumes in its use of negative space. For example, the first haiku in the series, “how to listen #1” appears in part one of the verse novel entitled “i am born.” In the poem, memory, body, and emotion intertwine as a reflection of the early life of Jackie and her life in Columbus, Ohio with her mother, father, and siblings: “Somewhere in my brain / each laugh, tear and lullaby / becomes memory” (20). This poem encapsulates the drive of the entire collection—the focus of the narrative is remembering a history in order to gain insight into the self and understand the how personal and cultural history shapes an individual.

Brown Girl Dreaming is a gorgeous exploration of personal and national history. Woodson's use of lyricism, imagery, free verse, and haiku are distinct and moving. I give Brown Girl Dreaming five stars and highly recommend it.

Padma Venkatraman's _A Time to Dance_

The Plot: Padma Venkatraman's A Time to Dance (2014) tells the story of a Bharatanatyam dance prodigy, Veda, who lives in India. The verse novel opens with a prologue poem entitled "Temple of the Dancing God" that describes Veda's first encounter with a bronze statue of Shiva, God of dance; a priest in the temple explains to her that she only has to look within and around her to see God "danc[ing] within all He creates" (2). The story then moves forward to an older Veda who is getting ready to dance in the Bharatanatyam dance competition. After winning the competition with her "flawless technique" and "skillful mastery over her body" (23), Veda is injured in a car accident and her right leg must be amputated from the knee down. Devastated by this loss, she faces the possibility that she will never dance again. With the help of her prosthesis, Veda becomes determined to continue dancing. When her old dance teacher refuses to continue to work with her, her grandmother Paati encourages her to try to work with Dr. Dhanam, a different kind of dance teacher who focuses on abhinaya, or emotional expression (123). With the help of Dhanam akka, the doctor who creates her new prosthetic leg, and her new friend and dance teacher Govinda, Veda relearns dance, as well as lessons in acceptance and peace.

The Poetry: Venkatraman's verse novel is told entirely through free verse poems that range in length from one to five pages. The poems are primarily made up of plain, every day language. Each poem is clearly written to move the narrative forward, and there is little time spent focusing on the intricacies of language. There are a few lyrical moments where the beauty of language and line are apparent. For example, in the poem "The Color of Music" Venkatraman uses sensory imagery and lyricism to describe the landscape and her experience of God.

The Page: In A Time to Dance, like many verse novels for young readers, the author places a heavier focus on the narrative than she does on the use of poetic devices and techniques. The author primarily makes use of the space and pause that the verse novel naturally creates through line break. While some critics might find this to be a significant weakness in the work, I would argue that Venkatraman's use of the verse novel is a valid and useful choice because space and pause (even if they are the only elements of "poetry" in the verse novel) require reader engagement in a way that traditional prose does not.

A Time to Dance told an engrossing story. I give Venkatraman's verse novel four stars.