Tag: novels in verse

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘Clap When You Land’ by Elizabeth Acevedo

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo explores how a father’s dual life impacts two daughters with two different identities who have to unify as one to move forward past tragedy.

Camino Rios and Yahaira Rios are half-sisters, but they don’t know about each other until their father dies in an airplane crash flying to the Dominican Republic like he always does for the summer.

Camino, who lives on the island, is devastated, especially since she had lost her mother years before to illness. Her best friend, Carline, is occupied with her boyfriend and their impending baby. Camino’s aunt, Tia Solana, takes care of her and the community as a healer. With hopeless New York City university dreams, Camino throws herself into training to become a healer, so she can follow in her aunt’s footsteps and assist her friend.

Yahaira lives on an island, too. Born and raised in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, she was a promising chess player until she found out her father’s secret. As the secret eats her alive, she faces her father’s untimely death and leans on her girlfriend, Dre.

The closer it gets to burying their father, the more secrets Camino and Yahaira’s extended family reveal, including about each other. Chatting via social media, they try to accept each other in their grief and unite to make sure their father receives the proper burial.

This is so far one of the top young adult novels in verse. Another competitor is Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi, who is also Dominican, and Dr. Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five. Novels in verse are becoming more popular in YA literature, but it’s difficult to deepen characters and storylines when writing long poems in the form of chapters. But Elizabeth Acevedo―an awardee for her previous two YA novels, The Poet X, and With the Fire on High, does an excellent job of navigating two separate lives handling unexpected grief. She says she was inspired by the real-life crash of American Airlines Flight 587, where most of the passengers had ties to the Dominican Republic and traveled back and forth from New York. Since it occurred weeks after 9/11 and had no ties to terrorism, the tragedy lost steam in American media as the Dominican community stateside continued to grieve. The loss of a parent hits the two characters but so do the lies that their father kept. The trauma and betrayal are spelled out in the pages as we get to know Camino and Yahaira more, especially when they are roaming through their own labyrinths of confusion.

Overall, the portrayal of two sisters interpreting their father’s fate miles apart from each other without knowing each other elevates the emotions in this novel. The gravity of the situation also feels authentic as the main characters try to figure out what’s next for them at a time when they are preparing to enter the real world.




View all my reviews

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne

Chlorine Sky

Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne is a novel-in-verse featuring two Black girls engaged in a toxic friendship that is hanging on a thread, but the verse and the story fail to strike a chord.

Skyy, the main character’s name we learn on the last page, is a basketballer who feels less beautiful compared to other girls, especially her best friend Lay Li, who seems to be the most beautiful girl at school. Lay Li is a boy magnet while Skyy suppresses crushes on boys. So when Lay Li’s ex-boyfriend Shawn tries to get more information on her new boyfriend Curtis, Skyy disses Curtis. And like that Lay Li ignores Skyy like she ignores Shawn. In disbelief, Skyy works to get back in Lay Li’s good graces as she feels the pain of losing her best friend over a trivial situation. She can’t confide in Lay Li or her older sister Essa, who’s always mean, and she doesn’t see her cousin Inga, who’s always nice, enough. So she stays on the basketball court and falls for a boy named Clifton. They kiss, but Skyy feels sad that she can’t share this information with Lay Li. Days go by until Lay Li comes to Skyy to share her very different experience with Clifton.

The novel-in-verse is becoming a genre that literary agents want to boost in the industry. Except it’s difficult to tell a sufficient story that fits into a novel in verse. This book’s verse is borderline mediocre, some good parts but mostly so-so parts as in the combination of words are not impressive. For grammar geeks, the paragraph breaks aren’t placed in the best spots with ampersands starting at lines and capitalization is not used enough. For visual geeks, the cover is beautiful with the oranges and navy blues around a Black girl trying to find herself while rescuing a friendship.

Overall, the book is short but not as sweet as expected. The story has familiar elements with the athletic girl being best friends with the fashionable girl. Opposites attract, but in high school the athletic girl feels inferior to the fashionable girl because of the heightened attention on what is classified as beauty. And beauty means everything in adolescence when boys are in the picture, especially when the boys are the ones creating the division between the female friendships.

View all my reviews

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘Punching the Air’ by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

Punching the AirPunching the Air by Ibi Zoboi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I say
That maybe
I was punching
All the walls
They put around me
Around us

I was punching
The air
The clouds
The sun


Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five illustrates a heart-wrenching portrayal of a Black teen boy trying to find what joy he has left in juvenile hall after being accused of putting a White teen boy into a coma.

Amal is a regular sixteen-year-old Black boy growing up in New York when he finds himself in a courtroom fighting charges that he put a White boy from another neighborhood into a coma. He gets sent to juvie, where he taps his artistic and poetic ability as best as he can, but he’s deterred at every corner. The other boys are volatile and the adults are judgmental. Poetry class is his only outlet, but Amal struggles with the work the instructor wants him to put into his poems. Then his artistry clicks for him, and this leads to him repainting a mural in the common area where the boys meet up with their families. Amal becomes known as “Young Basquiat,” a tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat, until that morsel of happiness is taken away from him, and his life seems to be precariously hanging in the balance again.

The entire story is told in verse. This young adult novel differs from others exploring the racial justice movement since the main character is in actual custody and his freedom depends solely on what a White boy says, only if he wakes up from his coma. How a Black boy’s life depends on a White boy’s testimony shows readers the racial dynamics even kids are dealing with. They had gotten into a fight that went too far. Amal says he didn’t throw the harmful blow that put Jeremy in a coma. The boys don’t know each other because Amal and his friends crossed over the physical boundaries of their neighborhood that separate Black and White families with markers of housing, education, resources, and opportunities.

Mental health is a major theme. One way Amal tries to stay grounded is through his Islamic faith. It’s refreshing to see a Black Muslim teen in a young adult novel because the religion is rarely seen in the genre, and when it is, it seems to belong to a Middle Eastern kid instead. Amal’s faith ties him to his mother, who reminds him to pray five times a day. He knows he stands out as a devout Muslim in juvie, and his faith remains under threat inside those gray walls behind bars. Amal also struggles with his poetry and art in the dreary environment. The story examines the power of art for youth since it represents healthy expression. When art is taken away by adults to cause detriment, a teen’s mental health could deteriorate, especially if they’re in a situation like juvie.

Overall, the novel dives into a serious issue of incarcerated teens and those teens looking for any glimpse of bright light they can capture to strengthen themselves. The co-author Yusef Salaam was one of the five Black and Latino teen boys found guilty in the Central Park jogger rape case in 1989. Salaam and Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise are now considered the Exonerated Five after they were exonerated in 2002 when the real rapist had been located through DNA testing. The novel is based on Salaam using his passion for art during his years behind bars also waiting for the truth to be revealed. That’s the most powerful aspect of this book: how race plays a part in who is trusted with the truth.

View all my reviews

Categories
what's lit

Ibi Zoboi Talks Writing Process With Yusef Salaam in New YA Book

Award-winning young adult author Ibi Zoboi and Dr. Yusef Salaam shared their writing process on their upcoming YA book.

On Instagram Live Wednesday, Ibi explained how she infused her writing into Yusef’s poetry in Punching the Air. It tells the story of 16-year-old Amal Shahid, a Black Muslim teen pursuing poetry and art, who finds himself in prison after “an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy,” according to the publisher HarperCollins Publishers.

During the video chat, Ibi wore a T-shirt printed with art by Yusef that he named “Born Brave” and had designed while wrongfully convicted for seven years over the 1989 rape of a White female jogger. He was a part of the Central Park Five, the group of four Black teens and one Latino teen blamed for the infamous crime. They became known as the Exonerated Five after filmmaker Ava DuVernay brought their story to Netflix last year in When They See Us. The group was exonerated in 2002 after the identity of the real rapist was discovered. Yusef was 15 when he went to jail.

While in jail, Yusef found ways to create art and poetry with the tools he could find like a pin in his clothes.

“Art is a completely liberating meditative process,” he said in the chat. “When you get the opportunity to delve into it and be free with it, you don’t really know where it’s going to go. And the beauty of it is when you finish coming out of the meditation and see what you’ve created, it’s like, ‘Wow.'”

Attendees were allowed to ask questions, and the first question focused on how Ibi and Yusef co-wrote the book.

“I’m the writer and Yusef is the storyteller in this situation,” Ibi said. “It was collaborative in the storytelling process, and I could not have written this book without Yusef’s input and Yusef’s history and Yusef’s mindset.”

She said while Yusef was busy promoting When They See Us she was hard at work. “While he was doing that, I was typing away and really having conversations with him, so in that sense he was the storyteller and I was the writer and transcriber, and Yusef was giving me ideas.”

Though they didn’t go into detail about the specific crime that leads Amal to trouble, the co-authors said the crime is inspired by their upbringings in segregated 1980s New York. They also said they didn’t want to apply Yusef’s real story to the novel.

Ibi and Yusef said they were inspired by the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teen, who was killed by a White teen mob in the predominantly White section of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn after inquiring about a car for sale with his friends. His group was mistaken for another group going to a birthday party of a girl one of the White boys had a relationship with.

The authors also recalled the Jena Six case of six Black teens in Jena, Louisiana who had beaten a White classmate in 2006. The incident followed a Black teen at their local high school trying to sit in a part of the courtyard reserved for White kids. The Jena Six received attention from civil rights leaders after they had been heavily charged with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Since this incident occurred before social media took off, Ibi said we tend to have a collective amnesia about racially charged events.

“I was scared to write this story, but I knew I could lean on you,” Ibi told Yusef. “I couldn’t have never written this story without you at all. One of things I asked you is whether or not you were OK with me as a woman telling this story and do you remember what you told me?”

“Absolutely,” Yusef said. “I don’t remember exactly what I told you, but there’s a certain power from a woman telling a story that can’t be not from a woman. I’m thinking about my mother as a nurturer. I’m thinking about Ava DuVernay as a master storyteller, who can take something out of the world …. I want to say I was so blessed to be able to have you in that space.”

Ibi and Yusef met in 1999 while they were both attending Hunter College in New York. American Street, Ibi’s debut novel, was a National Book Award finalist. She also wrote the YA novel Pride, a Pride and Prejudice remix, and the middle grade novel My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich. She edited the YA anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America.

Punching the Air is being recommended to readers who like Jason Reynolds, who made an appearance in the Instagram Live stream, along with fellow YA novelist Nic Stone.

The book is scheduled to come out Sept. 1. The authors said in the chat that they plan to do a book tour, but no news yet on if it will be in-person or virtual.