A review by Bob Tedder
Words such as limerence, malapropism, pugilism, cachinnate, callipygian, codswallop, onomatophobia and logorrhea are mostly found in ancient and arcane tomes of the sort worshiped by lonely academicians. And yet Kwame Alexander manages to include all of these lovely sesquipedalian morsels in his young adult novel, “Booked.”
The good news is the words are always defined in footnotes and always accompanied by the protagonists’ comments. And more good news: Along with giving readers a chance to learn some language arts, Alexander manages to fold a rollicking story into “Booked.”
The title is illustrative. For those of us not versed in sports trivia (“booked” in soccer refers to a referee documenting a foul), an investigation of the book’s title defines both the contextual explanation for “Booked” and the narrative’s cleverly crafted framing device. Perhaps while kicking around the author’s futbol acumen one should pause and briefly mention “Booked” is a novel in verse – 314 pages of blank verse!
What then can possibly spring from such a seemingly toxic mixture of soccer, poetry and linguistic legerdemain? Alexander answers this question by sublimely painting the academic, social and sports spheres occupying Nick Hall’s eighth-grade universe. There are standard touchstones applicable to Nick’s age group: a love for and participation in a favorite sport, the awkward brushes with first love, the bullies in the hallway, the injury and missing the big match, and the coming to grips with divorce. Sprinkled throughout the novel like raisins in a well-seasoned loaf are those wonderful words fostered by the academic oversight of Nick’s language-obsessed father. Although Nick professes to hate learning them he manages to use them in oft-times humorous approaches to his life crises.
This book, available for loan both in the Sandhill Regional Library System (three copies) and at The Speckled Paw (one copy), is worthy of the most enthusiastic endorsement. I give it a highly manicured thumb standing proudly at a rigid 90 degrees.