A Play on Words and the Game of Soccer in Kwame Alexander’s Booked

Kwame Alexander’s Newbery award-winning The Crossover takes on the explosive poetry of basketball. In his follow-up, Booked, he tells a more reflective tale in verse, one about a boy who loves soccer. This time around, his free verse echoes the lilting and graceful feel of the game.
Getting “booked” in soccer means getting written up for a foul, and a lot of the novel takes place within that reprimand, on the sidelines of the game. Twelve-year old Nick might live for soccer, but his family and fate have other plans. His dad has him working his way through the dictionary, making him read it from A-Z. His crush on the smooth and confident April keeps him at ballroom dancing class instead of kicking the ball around with his best friend Coby. And when he learns that his Mom and Dad are splitting up and his Mom will move away, appointments with a psychologist keep him out of practice.

While Nick is itching, always, to get on the field, his relationship with words and stories become a new kind of sport. Despite his reluctance to read the dictionary, he plays with words, making up his own definitions. He also creates an acrostic poem to describe his crush, April’s, “limerance”. He comes up with clever malapropisms to make his classmates and teachers laugh. And the librarian, Mr. McDonald, The Mac, encourages him to keep questioning, learning, and growing with books and words.
When emergency surgery takes him out of the game entirely, books become his savior. And there’s nothing more wonderful than watching Nick evolve into a thoughtful and engaged reader. With just a few short and powerful words, Alexander’s poem about Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse brilliantly demonstrates the arresting way a book can take hold of a reader.

Alexander makes poetry of middle school life in this novel, finding the rhyme and rhythm in homework assignments, texts, awkward conversations, ping-pong matches, soccer games, ballroom dance waltzes in ¾ time, even the bark and bite of the two “pit-bull” bullies at school, Don and Dean. Some of my favorite poems depict the mismatched conversations between Coby and Nick, who, in the way that only best friends can, talk over and around one another, and still show up for one another when they need it most.
Nick’s relationships with his mother and his teachers are also a pleasure to read. Even if Nicky feels like the world is against him, the adults in his life are so obviously and unflinchingly at his side. You can’t finish the book without wanting the Grammy award-winning, brain-surgery surviving librarian, Mac, in your life.
Booked takes on a lot of weighty issues for young people: separation, divorce, first love, and bullies, smartly and rhythmically weaving them through the game of soccer. Nick’s days on the sidelines become center stage, a time to discover what’s really at play in his relationships, not only with family and friends, but, also, with words.
Booked is in stores April 5.