As we continue to celebrate April being National Poetry Month, we are featuring some more novels in verse but now for young adult readers! Novels in verse are stories that are uniquely told through a series of poems instead of paragraphs. The titles featured below can be found on Hoopla or Libby either as an audiobook, eBook, or both. To find more titles, please search the Handley Regional Library catalog using the search term #yaverse--many of these titles can be found on Libby and/or Hoopla as well!
Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds-- As Will, fifteen, sets out to avenge his brother Shawn's fatal shooting, seven ghosts who knew Shawn board the elevator and reveal truths Will needs to know. This book can be found on Libby as an audiobook and eBook.
Three Things I Know Are True by Betty Culley--In a small Maine town, seventeen-year-old Jonah doesn't know his friend Clay's gun is loaded and he accidentally shoots himself. Now he's on life support in his family's living room. Liv, his fifteen-year-old sister, tries to adjust to her new life while she watches her world crumble around her. She sees her big brother somewhere in that broken body, but their mother seems more concerned with the machines than her son. Meanwhile, her mother is suing Clay's family, and the whole town is taking sides. Liv believes that Clay, with whom she is also friends, is broken up inside, and she wants to be a friend but is forbidden from seeing him. With the same steadfast love, she refuses to turn her back on either Jonah or Clay. This book can be found on Hoopla as an eBook.
Audacity by Melanie Crowder--The real-life story of Clara Lemlich, a Jewish Russian girl who emigrated to New York at the turn of the 20th century and spearheaded the fight for equal rights for laborers and women, is told by author Crowder in this novel-in-verse. Clara bucked both her traditional Jewish family's norms and the conventions of the society she found herself in, to stand up for laborers working in substandard conditions in the factories of Manhattan, like the sweatshop she was forced into. Year after year she fought for labor rights, organizing a women's union, and leading the Uprising of the 20,000. This book can be found on Hoopla as an audiobook.
Solo by Kwame Alexander--17-year-old Blade Morrison, the son of rock star Rutherford Morrison whose erratic behavior has been blasted on tabloid and magazine covers for years. Blade's mother has been dead for a decade. His sister embraces the edgy lifestyle that comes with being the child of a drugged-out, bad-boy rock star. But Blade wants more. And when he learns he's actually adopted, he sees a glimmer of hope in finding his birth mother—a journey that takes him to a small village in Ghana. This book can be found on Libby as an audiobook and on Hoopla as an eBook.
Love and Leftovers by Sarah Tregay--When Marcie's mother discovers her husband has left her for a male bartender, she takes Marcie to her childhood hometown in New Hampshire. Although Marcie is initially reluctant to leave her established group of friends – the Leftovers – she comes to view this change as an opportunity to reinvent herself. Marcie quickly falls into the arms of a popular jock at her new school, cheating on her old boyfriend back home (who she never truly broke up with). Just when she seems to be settling in, her mother decides they would be better off back in Boise, Idaho. Marcie is tossed back into her old life and the implications that come with it. This book is found on Hoopla as an eBook.
Loving vs. Virginia by Patricia Hruby Powell--In 1955, in Caroline County, Virginia, two teenagers met and fell in love. One was black, the other white. At that time, amid the injustice of segregation and prejudice, this was illegal. They could not get married—but Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving fought the law, married anyway, and their story led to the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, which forbade interracial marriage! This book can be found on Hoopla as an eBook.
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo--Xiomara Batista is a teenage girl living in Harlem who's learned to use her fists to send messages. When she's invited to join her school's poetry club, she knows her religious mother will never allow it. But Xiomara is determined to find a way because she has something to say that can only be shared through her poetry. This book can be found on Hoopla as an eBook and on Libby as an audiobook and eBook.