Josh Bell
is my name.
But Filthy McNasty is my claim to fame.
Folks call me that
‘cause my game’s acclaimed,
so downright dirty, it’ll put you to shame.
My hair is long, my height’s tall.
See, I’m the next Kevin Durant,
Lebron, and Chris Paul.
On our Top Five post, THE CROSSOVER ended up in our collective top five, tied with THE FOURTEENTH GOLDFISH, in fact, after BROWN GIRL DREAMING, THE NIGHT GARDENER, and THE FAMILY ROMANOV. It’s easy to see why from this opening stanza in the first poem: the voice is simply electric. The poetry does a great job of capturing that voice and the energy of the story, and while I’m not sure that it’s consistently this fine, I do think it places this book solidly within contender territory.
Despite the brevity of this story, the characters are wonderfully realized and their relationships grown and change over the course of the story. And yet the pacing is quick, and there’s plenty of external action to match the internal action (quite a contrast to REVOLUTION, let me tell you). It’s likely to appeal to plot-driven readers as well as character-driven readers, and as Nina mentioned previously it’s going to appeal to a broad segment of readers in the Newbery and Printz ranges.
Nina asked if there’s room on the Newbery roster for two nonfiction books, for both THE FAMILY ROMANOV and THE PORT CHICAGO 50 and I would ask the same thing of verse novels: Can we have both BROWN GIRL DREAMING (a foregone conclusion) and THE CROSSOVER. I’d certainly like to think so.
I
