Booked, the followup to Kwame Alexander's 2015 Newbery Medal-winning The Crossover, is an often funny, often poignant novel told in short poems.
Soccer-obsessed eighth-grader Nick Hall stays up too late one night with his friend Coby (they've been "tight as a pair of shin guards" since first grade), and wakes up to hear his mom arguing with his dad. Nick has trouble with his father, too: he wishes he could be something cooler than "a linguistics professor/ with chronic verbomania" who forces him to memorize words from the dictionary he wrote. As Nick confides to his audience, "And even though your mother/ forbids you to say it,/ the truth is/ you/ HATE/ words." Nick doth protest too much--for a guy who hates words, he's very big on wordplay, making Booked a treat for word-loving readers.
The story takes a heartbreaking turn when Nick's horse-loving mom leaves town to "chase her equine dreams": "HAY, Mom, why'd you BALE?" he texts. His troubles pile higher when he has to deal with "pit-bull mean" bullies, and falls for a girl he's too nervous to talk to. On top of that, Nick--a soccer star at his school--is living to compete in an international tournament, but it's not even clear he'll be able to participate. Throughout the quick-footed narrative (in which some of Nick's woes resolve and some don't), his evolving relationship to books and the world of words stays front and center. By the end, because of--and in spite of--the pressure of the well-meaning book-pushers all around him, he finds his own path to literature. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness