YA Books in Verse

This seems to be a really "hot" thing to do right now, to write novels in verse.  I think Ellen Hopkins is considered by many to kind of be the "mother" of this trend, but I have trouble with her content so I have avoided her books this week.

I think this is a great way to expose teens to poetry in a non-scary way.  Many teens think of poetry as difficult to read and even more difficult to understand, but novels in verse are a very far cry from old school traditional poetry.  Most novels in verse are written in free form poetry and are super easy to follow and understand.

I ordered this book a while back and it has only circulated a few times, so I thought this would be a good option for me to read so that I could use it for readers' advisories.

This is a book told from multiple perspectives during the era of the Vietnam War (and just before it).  You essentially have two couples, although one is just a loose couple and the girl in that pair is considered kind of slutty.  These teens basically just talk about things that teens in the 60s might talk about: drugs, abortion, sex, and, eventually, the Vietnam War.

The story line is kind of vague and undefined until the boys are sent to basic training, then most of the correspondence revolves around things happening at home or things happening in the Marines/Army or in Vietnam.

This book would be great for teens who enjoy historical fiction and I've been sure that it is included on our library's historical fiction list that the teens look at periodically.

This was one of my favorite books I've read during this class, as evidenced that I've used it for several assignments!  And it was one that I was simply CERTAIN I wouldn't like.

Told in multiple perspectives, we mainly follow Maura, a young wife and mother, Peter, "the help" at a local club for the wealthy, Celestia, the daughter of a wealthy man and who is staying at the club for the summer, and Kate, a nurse who is seemingly unconnected to the others in the beginning.  All of these people are forced to survive and rebuild after a dam breaks and millions of tons of water crash down from a mountain in  New England.

Each character really endeared themselves to me.  I loved Celestia for her total dismissal of "society", for daring to love someone beneath her social status, and for the the way she loved her family.  I loved Peter for his willingness to take a chance on Celestia and for knowing the reality was that they could probably never be together.  I loved Maura and her fierce love of her husband and willingness to protect her children so faithfully.  And I loved Kate for her realism and bluntness.

I had never heard of the Johnstown Flood and this book made me want to learn more about it.  The author includes a phenomenal list of resources in the back, perhaps knowing that the stories of survival would make people want to learn about it.