Wow, a verse novel that isn’t super emotional (most seem to involve a death or some intense event) but rather super fun and really explores other forms as well. I LOVED it, and I hadn’t even read the book that precedes it (Shakespeare Bats Cleanup), so I wasn’t coming in biased. Fourteen year old Kevin, a baseball player with aspirations, a poet in his free time, is a great male voice that defies stereotype. He’s a jock but not a jock, a poet but someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously and isn’t emo-ing out all over the place. He’s a breath of fresh air, as much as this book was. At times, funny, shy, embarrassed, confused, basically the whole range of teenage emotions (okay, maybe no self-loathing).
The book follows his team through the playoffs, his adjustment to the idea of his widowed father dating someone, and his confused feelings for his girlfriend Mira and his friend/crush Amy.
Koertge has a really great balance of poems in here - the ones moving the narrative forward, the dueling poems with Amy, and a few ones that capture the emotion that comes with losing his mother. “I Know What Dad’s Going Through” (p. 25) is so poignant and simple, no over-the-top emotions at all, just hitting the truth: “Sadness is a big dark bus with a schedule of its own. But when it pulls up and the door opens with a hiss, you pretty much have to get on,” it begins.
I cracked up at the back and forth Dracula and Frankenstein poems that he and Amy sent to each other, and could see teachers using these poems in classrooms to teach poetry. I don’t even like poetry that much (sorry!) but reading Amy and Kevin discuss poetry, I wanted to it. Their poems were hilarious and kept the book very light, quick, and fun to read.
There was nothing that I didn’t like about this book, or found flawed. Except this: it was too short!
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