Young Adult books are not my usual cup of tea. For whatever reason, I never really got into the genre when I was a teenager, or afterwards, and part of me wonders if it’s because I wasn’t a fan of the titans of the genre. I read the first six of seven Harry Potter books and didn’t fall in love with them like everyone else my age (I graduated from high school in 2010, so they were published when I was in elementary and middle school), thinking they were okay but nothing amazing. I read the first Hunger Games when it came out and thought it was a cheap rip-off of a few Stephen King novels (The Long Walk & The Running Man) and dismissed it accordingly. And, with the rise of John Green and his unique style of books, I gave The Fault in Our Stars a shot and came away underwhelmed.
Considering how consequential all those books are in the YA world, with Harry Potter arguably straddling the line between Children’s and YA technically, I think I was just turned off to the genre. The English teachers I had in middle and high school also didn’t assign YA books, focusing instead on the adult canon at the time (The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, 1984, etc.), and I was never really exposed to any of them on my own.
I am now currently in my second semester of graduate school for a Masters in Library Sciences, and one of the classes I am taking is titled ‘Library Materials for Young Adults.’ While it’s not a required course, I decided to take it as an elective in order to expose myself to an area of literature that I’ve had very little and rather negative interactions with. If I am to become a good public librarian once grad school is done, how can I expect to connect with a whole chunk of patrons if I don’t understand the literature they read and like?
We’ve read some great titles over the past few weeks, including The Book Thief and Children of Blood and Bone, but for an assignment this past week, we were told to read The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the novel, it is considered a novel-in-verse. This means that, instead of being written in normal sentences and paragraphs, the novel is made up of many, many poems, all of them interconnected and with proper titles, and the poems themselves serve as the narrative. Most of Acevedo’s poems in the novel are free verse, but she sprinkles some structured ones in as well, such as haikus.
I was intrigued flipping through the pages before I dove in and read it, and I wondered how deep the book could actually get--if you just made a novel out of poems, and most of them weren’t longer than the page they were on themselves, could you really get to know the characters and their inner thoughts and motivations?
I ended up tearing through the 360 pages in one sitting, and not because it was easier and faster to read than a normal prose novel. The book is that good, and the fact that it is written in poetry shouldn’t stop anyone from reading it. If anything, it should intrigue you even more, the concept of a novel-in-poems strange to those who haven’t heard of the concept or like poetry that much, but I’m telling you, it doesn’t make the story any less interesting or any less good. If anything, the story being written and told through poetry enhances the storyline that Acevedo writes, and it allows her character to tell us readers more about her inner thoughts and feelings in a way that is more authentic and natural than if she was writing the same expressions through normal prose.
The story itself is very simple but very powerful: it focuses on Xiomara, the daughter of Dominican immigrant parents, who lives in Harlem and is a sophomore in high school, and her struggle with coming into her own skin. She has an ultra-religious mother--a big problem, as Xiomara is questioning her faith, a twin brother named Xavier who is super smart but reserved and quiet--and has a secret that is revealed throughout the course of the book that would make his mother most likely disown him, and a father who is mostly non-existent throughout the course of the book, physically living in the same apartment as his family but never really interacting with them. Her best friend, Caridad, is aghast when Xio starts questioning her faith, and she becomes even more hesitant when Xiomara starts to develop a crush on a boy in her biology class named Aman.
One of the most remarkable things about the novel is Xiomara herself--she destroys all stereotypes about female/Latino teenagers, and she does it from page one. She fights with her knuckles when boys walk past her in the hallway and grab her butt or whistle at her; she questions her priest about the contradictions in the Bible and the seeming impossibility/misogyny of many Biblical stories; and she is a fierce poet, writing her feelings and thoughts and hopes in a journal through poetry. Over the course of the novel, we see her fall in (teenage) love with Aman, fight with her mother about religion, and grow into a confident young woman who eventually performs her poetry at a slam during the last few pages of the novel.
To me personally, the best and most important part of the novel was Xio’s struggle with her faith, and the kind of home life she has because of the faith. Her mother is ultra-religious, to the point where it dominates her every day, and when Xio says she’s having doubts about her faith and the concept of Christianity in general, her mother’s response is that of a typical religious zealot--she punishes her by making Xio kneel on rice, and she sends her to church every single day to try to force her to believe in God. And this is where the book hits hard for me--I’ve seen and heard stories of friends who are completely disillusioned with the Church and Christianity in general because they had militant parents who told them they were going to Hell if they didn’t believe in God or continued to be who they wanted to be. Parents forcing their children to believe something that seems ridiculous to them, and forcing them to attend church every single day or several times a week when kids today already have so many other activities going on, is ridiculous, and Acevedo makes the point so clear without ever explicitly saying it through character interactions, Xio's inner thoughts, and her mother's militant religiosity. As someone who leans in the same direction as Xiomara spiritually, I thought this aspect of the novel was extremely well written and perfectly paced.
Throughout the rest of the book, the story follows Xiomara’s struggle with her mother and how she tries to craft her own identity through her blossoming poetry writing, her brother’s struggle with his sexuality, and Xio’s first romance with Aman, the first boy that Xio has ever had a crush on. None of it is clichéd, and Acevedo throws in Spanish and teenage slang here and there to show it’s authentic and she knows what she’s talking about. It is a perfect #OwnVoices novel, and I marvel at how many other books like this that I’ve missed because I’ve admittedly been in the camp that dismissed YA for the most part, thinking YA books were all fantasy and cheesy romance and all of that.
Acevedo has crafted a masterpiece with The Poet X, and readers shouldn’t let the fact that it’s labeled as YA deter them from reading it. Don’t be like me--don’t be prejudiced towards novels like this, or YA in general, because of assumptions, stereotypes, and former bad experiences with YA novels. I would argue there is a big difference between literary YA and plot-based YA, and I will be seeking out much more novels like The Poet X that fall into the former category. The stigma surrounding YA has slowly started to disappear over the past few years, and novels like The Poet X are huge reasons for that.
At the end of the day, you need to read this novel. It won a National Book Award, a Printz Award (best YA literature), and many other regional and library awards, showing that it is among the best of the best of YA literature, and literature in general. For me personally, this book has opened up a whole new world--I have gone out and now checked out a bunch of other novel-in-verse YA novels to read and see if they can stand alongside The Poet X, and I’m excited to do so. Acevedo has crafted a beautiful, wonderful, and powerful #OwnVoices story with this novel, and I highly recommend it for all readers, no matter your age.
Rating: 5/5 Stars
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