When a high school teacher in the Bronx begins to host open-mike poetry in his classroom on Fridays, his students find a forum to express their identity issues and forge unexpected connections with one another.

In a series of short interconnected poems, students at a high school nicknamed Brimstone reveal the violence existing and growing in their lives.

Their stories are braided together through language, and through images of the sea that connects them. Two sisters are separated during the Scottish Highland Clearances (1850), when Jeannie goes to Canada and Sarah stays behind on the island of Mingulay. What could be a better time for Papa Angelo’s grandson to be born? Christened after the legendary ballplayer, young Joseph Paul learns much at his Italian grandfather’s knee.īeen To Yesterdays: Poems of a Life by Lee Bennett HopkinsĬhronicles Hopkins’ growing-up years between the ages of twelve and thirteen. It’s 1936, and the Yankees have just hired a star center fielder whose name sounds like music. In a blur of high school hormones and personal doubt, each girl struggles with how much to give up and what ultimately to keep for herself. Josie, Nicolette, and Aviva all get mixed up with a senior boy-a cool, slick, sexy boy who can talk them into doing almost anything he wants. It chronicles the struggle to survive and to keep community and heritage intact despite harsh conditions in an alien environment.Ī spare, lyrical-and ultimately heartening-novel about one family’s experience during the Vietnam War that has much to say to a new generation of readers.Ī winged red monster named Geryon struggles with his family, falls for the indifferent Herakles, and discovers photography as a means of comfort and escape.Ī Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl by Tanya Lee Stone This is Vera’s story, but it is woven from the same fabric as the stories of displaced peoples throughout history. In June of 1942, seven months after attacking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy invaded Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The story of high school students coping with the suicide of a classmate. (Note: books that have been newly added to this listĪfter the Death of Anna Gonzales by Terri Fields Many of these brief descriptions have been borrowed from lists published by The Horn Book. Why don’t you read a few of them and let me know how they are?Ī few of the themes in these stories are pretty heavy, so I’d recommend that you hold off on reading them until you are twelve years old-except for Looking for Me, Love That Dog, Hate That Cat, Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs, The Way a Door Closes, and Locomotion, which are fine for younger readers.

If you like novels written in poetry and want to find more of them, you’ve come to the right place! I’ve only read some of these young adult books, so I can’t vouch for every single one.

Looking for Me by Betsy Rosenthal