The Crossover by Kwame Alexander (review)

Twins Josh and Jordan have always been friendly rivals on the basketball court, where they are following in their basketball legend father’s footsteps. Over the course of the season, though, Josh finds his world rocked by small and large changes: he loses a bet that results in him having to cut off his lucky locks, he feels abandoned when Jordan starts hanging out with a girl, and his mother and father are fighting. When his anger and frustrations get the best of him, Josh lashes out at his brother on the court, and his mother, a principal at his school, suspends him from the team—and things get worse from there. Alexander fully captures Josh’s athletic finesse and coming-of-age angst in a mix of free verse and hip-hop poetry that will have broad appeal. The lively basketball poems in particular beg for energetic oral performance, while the free verse shows the multidimensionality of a teen wordsmith figuring out the shifting conditions of life on and off the court. The book draws additional strength from the portrait of Josh’s father, a strong but flawed role model who’s so haunted by his own father’s early death that he won’t take steps to guard his health. With pithy poems that use basketball as a metaphor for life lessons off the court, two-voiced poems that highlight the ebb and flow of conversations that say too much and nothing at all, and poems inspired by vocabulary words that require extended definitions to tease out their emotional relevance and force, this will inspire budding players and poets alike.