Rhythms and Layers

Kwame Alexander wrote his 2015 Newbery-winning novel The Crossover in poems that slip off the tongue effortlessly. The emphasis of the all caps and the line breaks assure even those who hesitate to read passages aloud that they will read (and sometimes shout) the lines properly from the start.

2015 Newbery winner Kwame Alexander
Photo: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

As with any great long poem, the novel's multiple meanings begin to emerge as the story progresses. The crossover move ("in which a player dribbles/ the ball quickly/ from one hand/ to the other./ As in: When done right,/ a crossover can break/ an opponent's ankles"), narrator Josh's signature play, takes on diverse aspects of crossing a threshold (from childhood to adulthood, life and death) over the course of the novel. The 10 rules of basketball that twins Josh and JB's father reinforce in them apply as much to life as they do to the game. The dreadlock incident (in which JB bets Josh that if JB can score the last basket of the game, he can cut off Josh's dreads--Josh agrees to one, JB cuts five, then their mother makes Josh slash the rest) hits Josh nearly as hard as it did Samson. The incident begins an escalation of his sense of loss and betrayal.

As Josh's rift widens with JB, who's not just his identical twin, but also his best friend, Josh is in danger of a spiral downward, and his parents won't allow it. Kwame Alexander told Karin Snelson in an interview for Shelf Awareness that he almost didn't keep the parents in the book. "In a lot of middle-grade and YA fiction the parents are done away with so that you can focus on the kids," he said. "My familial bonds were always extremely important, so that was my frame of mind at first. But as I wrote the book, I got caught up in this notion that the parents can't be that instrumental. And so the parents were introduced in the book, but they were just sort of there. I told myself, you have a loaded gun, but you haven't fired it. What's the point of introducing these strong parents if you aren't going to utilize that strength to make the story even more powerful? And once I decided that, I thought, well, that's the kind of house you grew up in, you can draw on your own relationship with your family."

So the final layer is art imitating life. There's no doubt of the emotional truth that informs this novel in verse.

A Game Born of Necessity

John Coy

The subtitle of Hoop Genius by John Coy, illustrated by Joe Morse, succinctly describes the reason the game exists today: "How a Desperate Teacher and a Rowdy Gym Class Invented Basketball." The young men at the YMCA had already run off two teachers by the time James Naismith arrived in December 1891. Naismith wanted to keep the guys from having excessive physical contact while also giving them maximum exercise.

Naismith combined a popular game from his Canadian childhood ("Duck on a Rock"), which rewarded skills in accuracy, with a requirement for speed, as the players ran up and down the court, defending their own basket and attempting to shoot into the basket of their opponents. The simple requirements of the game--two peach baskets and a ball--accounted for the speed with which the game's popularity spread. The game's 13 rules fit neatly on two double-spaced typed pages (reproduced on the book's endpapers).

Joe Morse's artwork connects past and present. He begins with stylized artwork in a muted palette of burgundy and cornflower blue, which includes period details but also conveys the immediacy and fast pace of the game. The contemporary images of the game at the close of the picture book connect back to that raw energy of those early unruly boys back in 1891.

As we draw down to the Final Four, we have a better appreciation for how James Naismith helped channel the energy of those young men (and a few young women, too) to bring us to the March Madness of today.