Who's DA MAN? The Crossover: The Graphic Novel by Kwame Alexander

JB AND I
are almost thirteen.

TWINS, two BASKETBALL
GOALS, at opposite ends
of the COURT.

I'm an inch taller with
DREADS to my NECK.

He gets his head SHAVED
once a MONTH.

I want to go to DUKE.
He flaunts
CAROLINA BLUE.

If we didn't LOVE each other
We'd HATE each other.

Basketball and competition run in the Bell Family. Famous locally as an international basketball star, his dad, know as "Da Man," Chuck Bell boasts that he "balled with Magic Johnson." The dreadlocked Josh goes for the flying slam dunk, and Jordan is the cool crossover shooter who makes all the threes. Together Josh and Jordan take their team to the playoffs for the championship game, but their unconcealed rivalry leads to a bet in which Josh forfeits his dreads and like Samson, fears he's lost his mojo.

And as the rivalry proceeds, Josh and Jordan find that they like the same girl, Alexis in the pink sneakers, but she chooses the fast-talking Jordan. Angry, Josh smolders until in the playoff his jealousy reaches the tipping point.

The crowd is screaming,
PASS THE BALL!

I see Jordan.
You want it that BAD?
HERE YA GO!

I pass it so hard it levels him, the BLOOD
from his NOSE still
SHOOTING long after the
shot-clock buzzer goes off.

Josh is suspended from the team, and still angry, he bets his dad, Da Man, that he can beat him in a quick one-on-one. Dad gets competitive, goes for a high-flying dunk, and collapses with a heart attack, foreshadowed by symptoms he's been keeping from the family.

The ball is passed to Josh and Jordan in a way they both didn't quite see coming.

Now who's going to have to be DA MAN?

In his new adaption of his 2015 Newbery Award winner, The Crossover (Graphic Novel) (The Crossover Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), Alexander's 2017 Newbery Award winner is a natural for a graphic novel. Author Alexander brilliantly makes the crossover and proves that he can rebound, too, in this powerful reexamination of what it means to have GAME. Alexander's writing in this graphic revisioning of his free-verse best-selling novel is equally powerful in its examination of the bravado up-and-down sides of the winning-is-all mystique, as he reworks his poetry into smart dialogue which heightens the conflict between the twins' competition as mirrored by their on-the-court conflict. The Emmy-winning artist Dawud Anyabwile's dramatic and insightful graphic art gives the story a flow which heightens the conflict inherent in this sports metaphor, making this almost mythic tale of rival fathers and sons accessible to a whole new audience for his earlier The Crossover (The Crossover Series) (see review here)

As I called it the first time--another SLAM DUNK for Kwame Christopher.

Other riveting middle-reader novels by Kwame Alexander include his novel about the twins' father's eighth-grade school days, Rebound (The Crossover Series) and the soccer novel Booked (The Crossover Series).

(Drumroll) The Envelope, Please! The 2015 American Library Association's Awards for Children's and Young Adult Literature

There's snow in Chicago, and that means it is time for the premier children's and young adults awards, especially the venerable John Newbery Medal, given for the best work of literature to the author, and the Randolph Caldecott Medal
for the best-illustrated book, both announced at the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting, February 2.

And the winners are...

The Newbery Award goes to Kwame Alexander for his novel The Crossover (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). In my review of March 19, 2014, I said "Watch for this one to take some honors in the awards for books debuting this year, because it's definitely got game--on-court suspense, real-life characters, and a moving narrative that confronts life changes with all the right moves. Slam-dunk!" Yeah!

Newbery Honor Medals went to El Deafo (Amulet/Abrams, 2014) by Cece Bell, and Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014) by Jacqueline Woodson, which also was the winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. (See review here.)

The Caldecott Medal for illustrations goes to Dan Santat for his The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend (Little, Brown and Company, 2014), reviewed here.

Caldecott Honors wen to The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandisky's Abstract Art, (Alfred A Knopf, 2014), illustrated by Mary Grandpre'; Nana in the City (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2014); Sam and Dave Dig a Hole (Candlewick Press, 2014),illustrated by John Klassen; Viva, Frida (Roaring Brook Press, 2014) illustrated by Yuyi Morales; The Right Word: Roget and his Thesaurus (Eerdman Boks, 2014, illustrated by Melissa Sweet; and This One Summer (First Second, 2014), illustrated by Jillian Tamaki.

The Coretta Scott King Author Awards went to Kwame Alexander for The Crossover (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); Marilyn Nelson for How I Discovered Poetry (Dial Books, 2014): and Kekla Magoon for How It Went Down (HenryHolt, 2014).

The Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards went to Christopher Myers for Firebird (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2014), Christian Robinson for Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker, (Chronicle Books, 2014), and Frank Morrison, illustrator of Little Melba and Her Big Trombone (Lee and Low, 2014).

The King-Steptoe New Talent Author Award went to Jason Reynolds' When I Was The Greatest (Atheneum Books, 2014)

The Coretta Scott King/Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award was given to librarian and literacy advocate Deborah D. Taylor.

The Michael L. Printz Award for Literature for Young Adults was given to Jandy Nelson for I'll Give You the Sun, (Dial Books, 2014).  Honor awards went also to Jossie Ann Foley, The Carnival at Bray, Jenny Hubbard for And We Stay; Andrew Smith, for Grasshopper Jungle, and This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki.

The Schneider Family Book Award for books about disabilities went to A Boy and a Jaguar by Alan Rabinowitz (Houghton Mifflin, 2014) and Rain Reign by Ann M. Martin, published by Feiwel and Friends, 2014). (See reviews here and here.

The Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for Beginning Reader Books was given to You Are Not Small, by Anna King (Two Lions Press, 2012), and honor medals went to Mr. Putter and Tabby Turn the Page (Houghton Mifflin  (Harcourt, 2014), and Waiting Is Not Easy!  (Hyperion Books, 2014). (See reviews here and here.

The YALSA Award for Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction went to Popular Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Greek, (Dutton Books, 2014) by Maya Van Wagenen.  Honor books include Shane Burcaw's Laughing at My Nightmare (Roaring Brook, 2014), Candace Fleming's The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, & the Fall of Imperial Russia and Ida Tarbell: The Woman Who Challenged Big Business--and Won (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2014) by Emily Arnold McCully, (see my review here).

The Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Children's Video was awarded to Weston Woods Studios, Paul Gagne, and Melissa R. Elard, for their film of the Caldecott Honor Book Me . . . Jane (See review of the book here.)

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to author-illustrator Donald Crews, and the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement in the area of young adult literature want to author Sharon Draper.

A complete listing of book and media awards presented today by the American Library Association may be found here.

Double-Teaming: The Crossover by Kwame Alexander

OH-H-H-H-H-H-H!
Houston, we have a problem!
I catch him
and slap
the ball on the glass.
Ever seen anything like that from a seventh-grader?
Didn't think so!
Me and JB are stars in the making.
The Rockets full-court-press me.
But I get it across the line just in time.
Ten seconds left.
I pass the ball to JB.
They double-team him in a hurry--don't want to give
him an easy three.
Five seconds left.
JB lobs the ball.
I rise like a Learjet--
seventh-graders aren't supposed to dunk.
But guess what?
SLAM!

Who's Da Man?

Josh and Jordan Bell are twins and the stars of their middle-school team and the pride of their dad, who played with Michael Jordan until an injury knocked him out of the NBA draft, Josh is an inch taller, can dunk when he's not doing his signature slashing crossover to set up his famous three-pointer, and sports long dreadlocks until Jordan wins a free-throw-shooting bet and the chance to whack them off.

On court Jordan shoots free throws at will, sports a shaved head, and specializes in trash-talking, but he switches to sweet-talking when a new girl in pink Converses shows up at the rec center to shoot with the others. Josh is drawn to her, too, but the easy-talking JB beats his time with Alexis, as Josh simmers on the sidelines.

But the two are almost unbeatable together on the floor as their team works their way toward the county finals. But underneath the teamwork, Josh still stews about the haircut and about his brother's fast moves with the new girl.  Now Jordan's got a girlfriend. Heck, even team goofball Vonnie's got a girlfriend.  Josh's anger finally flashes on court when he makes a pass to his brother that almost breaks JB's nose. Then JB passes a note to Josh to hand to Alexis during a math test, and when he's caught with it, Josh has to take the rap for his brother. The coach benches him, which is bad enough, but his mom, who is also the vice-principal, suspends him for the regular season from the team, and Josh has to do hard time from the stands as his brother become the superstar, taking the team to the finals, and with a swagger he leads Alexis to the team's table in the cafeteria every day while Josh eats alone.

DEAR JORDAN

without u

i am empty

the goal

with no net

i can no longer fit.

can you

slash with me

like we used to?

like two stars

stealing sun

like two brothers....

And then, as his mom has feared, something happens inside their dad.  He wouldn't go to the doctor, and then he's in the hospital.  Josh and Jordan  push through their rivalry, but still they show their love for their dad in different ways. Mom texts Josh as he decides to play in the final game:

Dad's having complications
But he's gonna be fine
and says
Good luck tonight.
Jordan says
he still doesn't feel like
playing, but I made him
go to the game to show
support. Look for him and
don't get lazy on your

crossover.

The title of Kwame Alexander's forthcoming The Crossover (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) is triply apt, a metaphor for a basketball move, for the coming-of-age premise of the novel, and a description of the author's unique style, a hard-driving sports story told solely in poetic form.  Despite the novelty of the narrative, Alexander's blank verse is dramatic, sometimes lyrical, sometimes falling into the rhythm of speech which skillfully delineates all of the strong characters in this novel, giving all of them their own voices. This is a powerful story of two emerging young men and their parents at a crossover point in their lives, one that uses basketball brilliantly to tell their story, but one in which winning the big game is not the end of the story, an ending which will leave readers a bit shaken and yet satisfied.  Watch for this one to take some honors in the awards for books debuting this year, because it's definitely got game--on-court suspense, real-life characters, and a moving narrative that confronts life changes with all the right moves.  Slam-dunk!

Speaking Poetically... Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets by Kwame Alexander

"Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing," wrote the award-winning poet Lucille Clifton. That's a broad statement, since the word "wonder" itself can carry dual meanings, to be in awe and to question something, but its meaning applies well to children, who know both feelings well.

But poetry often doesn't feel natural to most young people, who, like even the best of rapper-poets, are still tied to the idea of fixed rhyme and meter. But along comes Kwame Alexander, writing a novel about, of all things, a twelve-year-old who lives for basketball and outdoing his twin brother at it. It's not easy combining vibrant game-play with sibling rivalry and life and death in blank verse stream-of-consciousness poetry for middle-schoolers, but Alexander did it with aplomb, winning the 2015 Newbery Award with his novel The Crossover (review here).

Now Alexander turns his attention to spreading the word for poetry. As he describes his growing-up years, he had a head start.

In my home words came alive.
Our house was a Walmart of books,
Reading was our hobby, our playdate.

But since not all kids come with a home court advantage, Alexander and his teammates, Chris Colderly and Marjorie Wentworth, offer poems written in the style of famous poets such as e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Nikki Giovanni, and fourteen more. Here's Wentworth, doing Dickenson:

I keep an old vase in my room
That says believing in roses make them bloom.

And in the style of Robert Frost:

I have stopped to shake the dry snow
from the branches and watched the outline
of each bare tree sharpen like stone,
and consider that quite often
Life is too much like a pathless wood.

Colderly also takes a crack at Nikki Giovanni's colloquial style:

Poetry is barbecue, cotton candy,
blues, Birdland, Sunday morning gospel,
ripples on a pond.

And here he is, doing the poet Gwendolyn Brooks:

Bronzeville lads, way past cool,
Voices like butter, melting blues,
Bronzeville lads, gone too soon.

Kwame Alexander's Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets (Candlewick, 2017) has a lot to offer young readers in the upper elementary and middle school years in this introduction to the wonder of words and their power. The old saying, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," is true, and enticing young people to "get" the feel of famous poems and try their hand at writing their own both introduces these poets and offers models for writing. Teachers will want a copy of this book on their own shelves as a way to introduce their students to ways of writing from the senses and from the heart. "The exercise of celebrating poets in their own voices leads naturally to the idea of the classroom writing prompt—which Colderley, writing haiku in the style of Basho, seems to anticipate: “Pens scratching paper/ Syllables counted with care/ Poets blossoming,” says Publishers Weekly.

Kwame Alexander's other books also include the free verse soccer-themed story, Booked (see review here) and the best-selling The Playbook: 52 Rules to Aim, Shoot, and Score in This Game Called Life. Rebound, Alexander's prequel to his Newbery winner, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April of 2018.

Now and Later: Rebound by Kwame Alexander

Skinny picks
some other boy
to be on his team,

which is cool with me,
'cause I'd much rather be
at home lying across my bed
reading comics.

See you tomorrow, I yell
but he's already on the court

running a game
and his mouth.

Charlie Bell is taking the sudden death of his father hard. Even basketball is no fun. His dad loved the game and was good at it, but now it makes Charlie sad, and suddenly he's bad at it. His refuge is his superhero comics.

The Fantastic Four, the Black Panther,
use the TIME DILATION EFFECT
to freeze EVERYTHING
and move them back
in time.

I wish I could do
the same thing.

Charlie can't get with the time or get himself together. He's running late for school and decides it's easier to skip school. He heads off for the Quik Mart with Skinny and his troublemaker older cousin Ivan, and they decide to fund the trip by swiping some empty soft drink bottles off Old Lady Wheeler's porch to fund some snacks--Funyons and a box of Now and Later candy. Only that night Charlie's mom finds the wrappers in the trash he forgot to take out. She wakes him up early to hear his story.

Tell me the truth, or else!

Or else what? I say, wondering how that slipped out.
And wishing it hadn't.

Or else turns out to be summer vacation spent with his grandparents. Grandma's fried chicken could put KFC out of business, but Grandpa means business. As soon as dinner is over, he puts Charlie behind the push mower, following him around the yard, teaching technique and pointing out every sprig Charlies misses. This is just the first quarter. We're just getting started, Chuck, he says.

The newly christened Chuck is in for a bit of shaping up. The only answer Grandpa will take is "Yessir" and to add to Charlie's penance, his girl cousin Roxie, plays basketball way better than he does and is as hard a taskmaster on court as Grandpa is at home. Charlie takes refuge in a stack of his dad's old comic books and in the fact that he's beginning to make his foul shots and snag some rebounds in his games with Roxie. By midsummer, Charlie has become Chuck. He's master of the push mower and is getting close to beating Roxie at H.O.R.S.E.

But then he sneaks off from the family Fourth of July barbecue to meet Skinny at the Roller Skating Rink in town, where again Ivan leaves the two younger boys holding the bag, this one filled with marijuana. Skinny and Charlie are arrested, and Charlie has plenty of time to think about how he got there while he waits at the jail.

If I ever get out of here, I'm gonna do better, I promise, Charlie tells himself as he waits at the police station.

Charlie imagines the Black Panther breaking through the door to rescue him.

But it's Grandpa and his lawyer friend Smitty who come through the door tobail him out and take him home.

"I'll tell you again, Chuck." says Grandpa. "This is a team sport. You can surround yourself with people who don't play by the rules, or you can surround yourself with those who do. If you choose wrong, don't start complaining when the coach takes you out of the game.

We're all suffering, but we still here, Chuck."

Sometimes you win the game with a slam dunk, and sometimes what wins the game is a rebound, in Kwame Alexander's forthcoming Rebound (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), the prequel to the author's 2015 Newbery Award-winning The Crossover. (see review here).  In the summer of 1988 Charlie becomes Chuck Bell, Da Man, college superstar, coach, and father to the rival brothers Josh and Jordan Bell, who in their time will also suffer the sudden loss of their father, Chuck.

Writing in a form of blank verse, the winner of multiple awards, Kwame Alexander, again gets inside his thirteen-year-old character's heart and mind at a crucial time in his life, a time when, as he says, he finds his way out of a black hole and into a life in which in twenty years his twin sons will want to honor his memory. As in his first book, Alexander makes use of basketball as a metaphor for life, with his thirteen-year-old protagonist on the cusp between childhood and maturity, now and later, like his favorite candy, in which Charlie learns that even when you shoot and miss, you always try to rebound your own shot.

Savor the Word: How to Read A Book by Kwame Alexander

First find a tree--a Black Tupelo or Dawn Redwood will do. It's okay if you prefer a stoop--like Langston Hughes.

An author usually wants to tell you WHY you should read--preferably his or her own book-- preferably immediately.

But this author wants to tell you HOW to read a book.

And being a poet, by the way, he uses a METAPHOR!

Peel its gentle skin, like you would a clementine.

Dig your thumb into the bottom.
Squeeze every morsel
of each plump line
until the last
drop of magic drips....

The words inside a book are likened to the ripe, juicy sections of a citrus fruit, in Caldecott Medalist's Kwame Alexander's lyrical poem-book about the book, perhaps best read in a tree... or on the front steps... or perhaps in bed, as Alexanders suggests...with another metaphor.

Get cozy, between the covers...

Alexander exhorts his readers not to hurry, to take time to savor how the words go together, to think, imagine, get inside that waking dream that is a story, another time and place where you can inhabit for a while, be someone else, and live a different life before you come to...

THE END.

Winner of the Caldecott Award for his top-selling middle school novel, The Crossover (The Crossover Series), and other noted works (read reviews here) Kwame Alexanader has become a strong advocate for reading and poetry, as he shows in his latest book, illustrated magically by the Caldecott-winning Melissa Sweet. To say artist Sweet uses mixed media for this book is an understatement, as she crafts her collages from found objects, including an old paint can lid, with watercolors and gouache paints and handmade papers and hand-printed text. This new book is clearly a work of love by author and illustrator in their latest, How to Read a Book. (Harper, 2019).

Says Kirkus Reviews, "A linguistic and visual feast."

Drive the Ball Home: Booked by Kwame Alexander

No one's blaming you. I'm just asking--

I'm tired of this. You're always fussing
at me for not reading your stupid dictionary.

You don't let me do ANYTHING.You take my phone,
you took my Mom,
and now you want to
take away
the last good thing
in my freakin' life--
SOCCER

Calm down, Nicholas.

NO. My life sucks.
I get bullied at school
I get bullied at home.
I HATE MY LIFE!

Nick's life had seemed like an open field and he was dribbling fast toward the goal. with the crowd chanting his name. Nick and his best bud Coby are headed for the Dr. Pepper Dallas Cup games, on opposite teams, but there together. He's in honors classes at Langston Hughes Magnet, and April has been smiling at him a lot lately.

But things begin to go wrong. His logomaniac dad hassles him daily to study his precious book, the dictionary of arcane words that nobody uses. Nick hits a dry spell in academic fervor at school. Ms. Hardwick calls him out in English for daydreaming, and the meanie twins, Don and Dean, are planning to pound him when they catch him alone.

Then Mom drops the bomb. She's going back to Louisville to take up her beloved horse training job, and it looks like she means to stay. Nick knows all that is because Dad dragged her off to a no-horse town because of his teaching job, and when he unloads on Dad, he is grounded and made miss a tournament to meet with a shrink to talk about his "problems." Nicky feels like he's gotten an unfair foul call from, like, everyone.

And then things gets worse.

Everything slo-mos...
Two crazed eyes glued to the ball.

You wind for the kick. WHACK!
POW!--Coby's kick, aiming for

the ball, finds your--THWACK!
ankle instead.

Nicky feels like he's drawn a double yellow card. He finds himself hospitalized with appendicitis and a broken ankle, while Coby heads off to Dallas. But at least Mom comes home. Maybe she'll stay, but then, maybe not.

Kwame Alexander's companion book to his slam-dunk 2015 Newbery Award-winning The Crossover, chooses another sports as metaphor in his latest, Booked (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). Alexander makes good use of the usual stuff of the middle-school novel--bullies, hard-nosed and quirky teachers, a special girl, trash talk with his sports buddy--all in unique free verse form, Nick's stream-of-consciousness thoughts--a jumble of the emotions of twelve-year-old kid as he runs up against a new game whose rules he has to learn as he goes along. Growing up is hard to do, and sometimes you get a bad call along the way, but Alexander's young heroes have got game, and in this new one, if Nick doesn't kick the winning goal, he at least learns to make that good pass that moves the ball down the field. Another winning season for Kwame Alexander.