Another free verse novel. I liked the story, again, and this time I was able to get used to the line breaks much more quickly. (See my review of Home of the Brave for thoughts on my preference for prose in a novel.) Reaching for Sun is sort of one long metaphor in whch the main character, Josie, is a flower (a wisteria vine?) that’s been trapped in darkness, but is now reaching for the sun. Josie’s “darkness” is a set of rather formidable challenges: cerebral palsy, a mom who’s too busy with school and work, absent-tee dad who deserted the family long ago, total rejection from the kids at school who think she’s stupid, too much therapy and not enough downtime. Then there are Josie’s mom’s expections; she wants Josie to become a lawyer or an astronaut, but Josie’s not really interested in any of the high-powered careers that her mom has picked out for her.

But Mom’s dreams for me
are a heavy wool coat I
wear, even in summer.”

The entire book reads like that little word picture. As I noted in my interview with author J.B. Cheaney the other day, I wish I could write metaphors and similes like that one. I tend to think in cliches.

Josie makes a mistake in the course of the story by dealing with some of her problems by lying. She and her mom become estranged because in order to do what she wants to do and start to grow up, Josie lies to her mom instead of confronting the disagreement between the two of them and discussing it. The author does a very good job of showing how destructive lies can be, and still she also demonstrates that forgiveness and reconciliation are possible.

She pulls me to her
and I feel that old kudzu vine
ripped away between us
and the truth
like sun on my face.”

There are lots of little things to like about this little book. There’s a little flip-book picture of a flower bud turning into a fullgrown flower drawn in gray pencil-like sketches in the lower right hand corner of the pages. Josie’s grandma and her friend, Jordan, are both great characters, slightly eccentric, but not so odd that readers would reject them. Good use of language. Good story of a girl’s thirteenth year of growing and becoming a young lady under less than optimal circumstances.

Tracie Vaughn Zimmer’s website.

Other bloggers weigh in:

Little Willow: “Reaching for Sun is a verse novel told from Josie’s point of view. Though Josie sometimes has difficulties expressing herself and speaking her thoughts, her voice on the page is full of strength.”

Cynsations interview with Tracey Vaughn Zimmer: Ms. Zimmer says: “I’d like to be a Poetry Preacher–I truly believe it can transform children’s reading skills (fluency, vocabulary and comprehension) but even better than all that it grabs the hand of its reader and changes the way we see the world.”

MotherReader: “So today I sat outside in the sun, to read it surrounded by the daffodils, the crocuses, and that yellow flowering bush… thing. And if you can, that’s the way you want to read this book, with beauty all around you and beauty on the pages in front of you.”

A Fuse #8 Production: “The verse novel still has to justify its own existence with every book that uses its style. When you pick up a work of fiction written in verse you have to ask yourself, ‘Would this title be stronger or weaker if it were just straight prose?’ Zimmer’s advantage is that Josie lives a life that’s best suited for poetry.”

OMS Book Blog: “This brand new book written in free verse tells about the growing and blossoming of a seventh grade girl named Josie.”

I think that last sentence about sums it up. If you like “growing and blossoming” books written in free verse, this one is for you.

I like poetry as much as the next guy, which is to say I have my favorites (mostly rhyming poetry with a distinctive metric pattern) but a lot of it leaves me, well, sort of . . . confused. Home of the Brave is a novel for middle grade children written in free verse form (is that a contradiction in terms?). It’s not confusing, but it’s really a prose story in spite of the author’s admittedly masterful use of poetic images and devices. At least, I think it’s prose, and the arrangement of the words on the page annoyed me all the way through to about page 150 when I finally came to terms with the gimmick and forgot about it. Here, I’ll give you the first lines of the novel as an example:

When the flying boat
returns to earth at last,
I open my eyes
and gaze out the round window.
What is all the white? I whisper.
Where is all the world?

I’m a little fuzzy about the line between poetry, especially free verse, and prose, but I could read those sentences more fluently if they stretched across the page and wrapped around like prose instead of breaking off each phrase and falling down to the next line. I guess I’m just a creature of prosy habit.

Home of the Brave is the story of Kek, a refugee from Sudan who is being resettled in Minnesota with his aunt and his cousin, Ganwar. Kek’s family all died in the wars in Sudan, except for his mother who is missing and may also be dead. Kek indeed needs a great deal of bravery to make himself a home in this new place of America. Slowly Kek makes friends with a girl named Hannah who lives in his apartment complex, with some of the other immigrants who are in his ESL class at school, and, best of all, with a cow to whom he gives the name, Gol, family.

Maybe the arrangement of the words in verse form was meant to mirror the way Kek thinks and talks in his new language in fits and starts and phrases, but why couldn’t it look like this instead:

When I bury my face in Gol’s old hide I smell hay and dung and life. She shelters me like a warm wall, and that is enough for this day.

I rather liked this story of an immigrant’s experience in acclimating to the U.S. and of family and what it means from the persepctive of a diiferent cultural background. Do you think the publisher might put out a new edition in prose form for the prosaic among us? It would make the book a lot shorter, I think, not so much white space. But the story and the language would still be there, and those are the parts I enjoyed the most.

I have a friend, Aruna. from Sierra Leone; he’s the adopted son of one of my best friends. I would love to give Aruna a copy of this book. I think he could identify with the character of Kek.

Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate, who by the way is the author of the Animorphs series, is nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.