5th! Annual! Verse! Novel! Week!
It's coming! The weird, nerdy thing that we host here every year... Verse Novel Week! This will be the fifth year and I'm super excited once again.
(Related: How has it been five years already?)
I know you want to sign up to participate in our annual celebration of novels in verse! We love this format around here and for the fifth year in a row, we'll spend the last week in April (beginning Monday, the 25th) sharing that love.
If you'd like to participate, we'd love to have you! You can sign up to review or recommend a verse novel of your choosing, make a thematic list of verse novels, or write about any topic related to the format you'd like! Authors are welcome and encouraged to join us, too!
If you'd like to get an idea of past topics, you can find the Verse Week archives right over here.
Signup!
Stories well told have the power to open our eyes and enlarge our hearts. They’re kind of magic that way. We wander into the world of a story and emerge changed—sometimes in small ways, and sometimes big, with lasting impressions that shape how we think and feel about the world and our experiences in it.
It's coming! The weird, nerdy thing that we host here every year... Verse Novel Week! This will be the fifth year and I'm super excited once again.
(Related: How has it been five years already?)
Novels in verse come from a tradition of putting stories into language that flows with the magic of poetry. The Iliad and the Odyssey is something that any freshman high school student can tell you about. Verse novels stem from this oral tradition dating from 1600-1100 BC; the power of verse flows like music with the beauty of epic and poetic language.
Not to neglect Old English and Geoffrey Chaucer’s raucous and rowdy tales of those on a pilgrimage, I must mention those monks of olden days who told tales that to this day make us smirk and smile. In verse, Chaucer painted tales of the good folk who laughed about and flaunted their rowdy and raucous adventures.
So many people claim they don't "get" poetry, then they quote some lyrics from their favorite songs.
I understand this prejudice, this preconception that poetry is difficult. I understand it, but I disagree. I think poetry takes a big, emotional idea and distills it into a few potent stanzas. It packs a lot of force in its compressed punch, and therefore, it hits the readers' feels hard.
While fiction is a meandering walk, poetry is a sprint. When it's good, at the end, you should feel breathless and sweaty. Your heart should beat wildly.
Full confession: before Tricks, I had never read an Ellen Hopkins' novel. Novels in verse are right up my alley, but I just couldn't get over my perception of Hopkins as the drug writer.
Reading about people getting hooked on drugs and terrible things happening seemed about as interesting as listening to a friend tell you about that totally awesome trip they had once. But I saw her speak at the Montgomery County Book Festival, and she spoke very passionately and personally about the books she writes. I chose to read her 2009 release, Tricks, because the sequel, Traffick, is coming out this November.
I’ve always loved poetry; I used to hate reading novels in verse.
Part of my aversion to verse novels can be attributed to my first experience, which was Crank by Ellen Hopkins. The angsty, dramatic, dark story of addiction that is perennially popular with teenagers didn’t appeal to me at all.
The sentences
just seemed so
choppy.
The line breaks
nonsensical,
random.
When I offered to write a post for verse novel week, I thought I’d review three of my favorite verse novels. Easy, right? And then … I flipped through my reading journals to choose which books I wanted to highlight, and I realized how hard it was going to be to narrow it down to three!
(Granted, this is a very good problem—so many great verse novels out there!)
So, no top three. Maybe I could focus on a single stand-out? Or maybe go for something old and something new (something borrowed? --thanks, Vancouver Island Regional Library--something blue?).
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Podcast Episode #32: Talking Girls & Sports
