02/22/2016
"The Crossover" by K'wame Alexander
Copyright: 2014 (237 pages)
Realistic fiction

Photo taken from Wikipedia

I must say, when I first picked up this book, I thought for sure I won't enjoy it. I'm not a sports person. I know nothing about any kind of sports, and even by the first glance it's already obvious that sports is what this book is all about. What made me give The Crossover a try is the fact that it's written in poetry. Now that is right up my alley.

I was not wrong. The Bell father and sons live and breathe basketball. The book was written from the point of view of one of the twins, Joshua Bell, in the form of free verse poetry. As a result, the book was packed full with terminologies I have zero idea about. "Crossover" is about the only basketball terminology that Josh took the time explaining. Speaking of explaining things, Josh Bell's diction is one of the many aspects of this novel that I really like. One thing about Josh that I immediately notice, beside being skillful in basketball, is that he has a wide range of vocabulary. Every so often he dedicated a whole page to define a word dictionary-style, along with examples of the word being used in a sentence. Most often, those examples correlate to the events in the book to keep the story flowing. I feel like it's a great way to help readers learn new words whether they meant to or not. For example, I don't think I would ever forget what "pulchritudinous" mean after finishing this book. It means: "having great physical attractiveness".

See?

Another thing that I found unique is how personal, casual, and day-to-day this book came across. Instead of imagery, Alexander uses font size, paragraph alignments, and even letter arrangements to describe what's happening in Josh Bell's head. We see words that are spelled in all caps, diagonally. We see words that have capital letters every other letter. We see words that are spelled downwards. All these made me feel Josh Bell's excitement and thrill when he's playing on the court along with him. And then, later on as Josh feels more sad or frustrated than excited, the font style and size goes back to normal. Lastly on his county championship game, we see the funny font sizes again.

Too many people are discouraged by novels due to the sheer density of words in each of its pages. Many more are turned off by the amount of "big words" found within the sentences. So the way Alexander wrote The Crossover made this novel a lot more down to Earth, just so anyone - avid readers or beginners, basketball fans or non-sport enthusiast - would feel welcome to pick it up and give it a try. After all, The Crossover is not a hundred-percent sports. There's also family, friendship, loss and mourning. Although there are many obvious hints about Chuck Bell's poor health since the beginning, the part where he passed on still hits me hard. I suppose stories feel different when told through poetry. There are less words, so it leaves the mind to fill up more gaps - making closer connection between the story and real life. In short; this novel is poignant, funny, unique and memorable. If you haven't read it yet, do it now.