Blending genres: novels in verse for adolescents

Kliatt, Sept, 2002 by Michele Winship

MW: Your novels address issues of school violence, abuse, teen pregnancy, racism--all very controversial topics. What would you say to censors who consider your books unacceptable for their content?

MG: If my books are unacceptable, then real life with its horrors is equally unacceptable. There is more of horror on the evening news than in my books. And there is nothing in my books that isn't in the lifes of teenagers today. just because it's controversial doesn't mean it should be taken off the discussion table. Kids need honesty about such issues above ail. I see my job as a writer to reflect honest concerns. If someone reading my books can say, "Hey, that's me; I've felt like that," then I've done a good job. I hope my books show that everyone goes through similar problems, and there are people out there to listen. As I've said, I taught in the same high school I went to as a kid, and I often felt that there was no one to talk to. Kids do get lost. Books can entertain, enlighten and rescue.

MW: Are you planning to continue to write in this genre? If so, what might be coming in the future

MG: Yes, I am planning to write to continue in this genre. I just finished two books. One is Diner, making the rounds, about four teenagers who hang out in, what else, a diner. But now I JUST finished Last Stop: Coney Island, about a homeless girl who meets a middleclass boy. The book came about from a real letter I received a few years ago. It said, "Hello, my name is Nicky, I live in a car. I read your book in the library."

OTHER NOTABLE POETRY NOVELS

Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy by Sonya Sones (HarperCollins, 1999) is a work of poetry inspired by true events. In Sones' first book, she tells a story of a young woman's nervous breakdown, narrated by her younger sister. Sones' oldest sister was hospitalized and diagnosed manic-depressive when Sones was almost 13. In order to cope with her fear, she kept a journal that inspired the poems in this novel.

Sones' narrator struggles with her feelings of helplessness and her own fear that she, too, could have the same kind of breakdown. The poems speak in the authentic voice of a young girl who has hidden her family secret behind a mask of normalcy, fearing rejection from her peers should they find out about her sister. She struggles with the shift in family dynamics and her own conflicting feelings about visiting a sister who is so different from the person with whom she had shared a room. An author's note at the end of the book supplies readers with contact information for various mental health resources.

The Brimstone Journals, by Ron Koertge (Candlewick, 2001), is a gripping drama, eerily paralleling the events of Columbine, Colorado, even though the manuscript was begun prior to that tragic event. The various members of Branston High School's class of '01 tell the story. Readers will recognize members of their own high school classes--the jock, the foreign-born student, the popular girl, the fat kid, and Boyd. Boyd is angry at the world, and he wants to do something about it. He is recruited by a white supremacist who uses him to plan a war of his own. Boyd keeps a hit list that grows by the day, and recruits more "foot soldiers" to carry out the plan. Koertge is able to build suspense using the perspective of different narrators as rime moves quickly toward the day the plan will be carried out.