Three novels-in-verse perfect for 'tween' readers

Award-winning narratives that treat history, racism, and teen woes in free verse.

By Jenny Sawyer

from the April 15, 2008 edition

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In poetry, less is more. But don't be fooled. Compact language hardly makes for a muted emotional impact.

In fact, as three recipients of the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award demonstrate, poetry, like coming of age, expands meanings. And sometimes, via the most insignificant moment, it opens doors to different, deeper ways of feeling, to new modes of understanding the world.

For those who don't run in poetry circles, a brief note about the award. Given annually by The Pennsylvania Center for the Book and Penn State University Libraries, the honor recognizes an anthology or single volume poem for children written by a living American poet.

And while there's no bias toward free verse, several recent winners and honorees have been just that – melding poetry with a book-length narrative structure.

The 2008 award winner, Birmingham, 1963 by Carole Boston Weatherford (Wordsong, 39 pp., $19.95), relies on a picture-book format to examine a notorious day in civil rights history. Paired with archival photographs, her spare text begins with the voice of a fictional narrator, who chronicles the historymaking events of the year she turned 10.

The book may open with marches on whites-only lunch counters, but it's the innocence of Weatherford's details – a first sip of coffee, patent leather cha-cha heels – that sets the stage for the protagonist's (and the reader's) eventual horror.

The morning of the bombings begins with:

The day I turned ten...

My little brother sopped red-eye gravy

with biscuits

And yanked my pigtails like always,

Poking out his tongue when I tattled.

But when the dynamite under the church steps explodes, life (and the language that captures it) will never be ordinary again. Even birthday candles are replaced by "cinders, ash, and a wish I was still nine."

In Helen Frost's The Braid, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 95 pp., $16) the 2007 Honoree, history also provides the backbone for this slim novel-in-verse. In Frost's book, though, the year is 1850, and the persecuted protagonists are not American, but Scottish.

When their family is evicted from the Western Isles, sisters Sarah and Jeannie find themselves an ocean apart with only a braid of their hair to remind them of the family they once were. But like this precious braid, their stories intertwine – each girl relating her separate, but related, stories of survival in alternating chapters.

One of the wonders of Frost's book is the way she interweaves longer verse (chronicling the girls' experiences) with shorter poems that capture and illuminate a small, otherwise insignificant detail. In fact, it's often these shorter poems that both link Sarah and Jeannie and expand the story's meaning.

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