By Kwame Alexander
A novel in verse about a soccer-mad twelve-year-old who hates reading, the year his parents separate and a rapping librarian slips him the right book.
Nick Hall is fast on the soccer field and faster with a comeback, and the one thing he can't stand is reading, which is bad luck, because his dad is a professor who wrote a whole dictionary of odd words and makes Nick work through it page by page. Then the season he's been counting on falls apart. His parents sit him down to say they're separating, his mom takes a job that moves her out of the house, a pair of bully twins decide he's their target, he can't get a word out around a girl named April, and his appendix bursts and lands him in surgery right before the biggest tournament of his year. It's all told in short, quick poems, with a librarian who quotes rappers and keeps handing Nick the exact book he didn't know he wanted.
I'd reach for this one when an older child insists that reading isn't for them. It's written in verse, so the pages are short and airy, the chapters fly by, and the soccer keeps things moving before a reluctant reader clocks how much heart is underneath. Nick hates books the same way your child might, and it's a librarian who wins him over, which means a struggling reader gets to sit in the hero's seat and root for him. It's a standalone by the author of The Crossover, funny and quick, and the heavier parts, a hospital scare and a marriage falling apart, are handled without piling it on.