cyphomandra asked about Newbery novels in verse, and friends, I have THOUGHTS. I have OPINIONS. Or actually I have neither of those things, I just have FEELINGS, feelings first engendered decades ago when I first read Karen Hesse’s
Out of the Dust, which despite the lapse of time have yet to subside.
Out of the Dust won the Newbery Medal in 1998. It is about a girl named Billie Jo, so named because her dad really wanted a boy and apparently wanted his daughter to be reminded twenty times a day that she was a disappointment. It’s the Great Depression, and they live on a miserable Dust Bowl farm where Billie Jo’s only source of solace is playing her piano.
But then ONE DAY, someone leaves a can of kerosene on the stove. This kerosene catches fire, so Billie Jo grabs it with her bare hands to throw out the door! But she reaches the door just as her pregnant mother is about to enter, and thus accidentally hurls flaming kerosene all over her!
The mother dies a slow and agonizing death of her wounds. The baby IIRC is stillborn, but I can’t recall the details of this point because I was too busy obsessing over all the neighbors coming to Billie Jo’s dying mother’s bedside murmuring “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.”
Billie Jo’s mother is dead. Billie Jo can no longer play the piano because her hands are horribly scarred from the kerosene. Billie Jo jumps a train to get out of Oklahoma, presumably to escape to a place where no one knows “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.” But in the end she comes home, and there is I believe an attempt at a vaguely hopeful ending (Billie Jo is perhaps attempting to play the piano again?) but it is TOO LITTLE TOO LATE.
This was my first novel in verse. It was, I believe, also the Newbery’s first foray into novels in verse. (There are earlier collections of poetry, like
A Visit to William Blake’s Inn and
Joyful Noise, but a poetry collection is a different beast.) It has given me an abiding aversion to novels in verse, a prejudice that has proven ineradicable even though I loved Thanhha Lai’s
Inside Out and Back Again (Newbery Honor 2012) so much that I’ve read all of Lai’s other work, AND ALSO loved Jacqueline Woodson’s
Brown Girl Dreaming (Newbery Honor 2015) so much that I’ve been making a game stab at reading all her work as well, although as she has published approximately 500 books I haven’t managed it yet.
As I contemplated this fact, I wondered woefully if I would never learn to let go of this prejudice. But then I started totting up the other Newbery novels in verse.
Once
Out of the Dust opened the sluice gates, an inundation of Newbery verse novels followed. Well, okay, more of a trickle, but if you are averse to verse novels it feels like quite a lot.
2002: Marilyn Nelson,
Carver: A Life in Poems, actually a biography and not a novel, but includes a particularly scarring poem about lynching.
2009: Margarita Engle’s
The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom. You know how a lot of the earlier Newbery books were exciting adventure stories about the battle for freedom? This is not an exciting adventure story. This is a long, slow, bloody trek of misery to freedom.
2015. Kwame Alexander’s
The Crossover. Dead father.
2018. Jason Reynolds’
Long Way Down. Dead brother.
2020. Jasmine Warga’s
Other Words for Home. Refugees. Actually not super depressing, though.
2022. Rajani LaRocca’s
Red, White and Whole. Dead mother.
2025. Lesa Cline-Ransom
One Big Open Sky. Dead father.
So actually I think the numbers are on my side here. Newbery novels in verse have a 70% chance of being miserable! It is right and proper that I approach them with crushing dread.