A whole novel told in poems can look strange and a little scary to a child who's only ever read regular chapters. This is the way in: start here, with the funniest, most story-driven verse there is, and each book asks you to feel a little more of what the poems leave unsaid, until the quiet, spacious kind of verse novel feels like an old friend.
What climbs from the first book to the last isn't the page count, it's how much of the story you have to feel in the gaps. Love That Dog is short and funny and almost tells you everything out loud; by the end, Brown Girl Dreaming trusts a child to sit with a poem and let it open on its own. Start at the top and let each book feel easy before the next, because every rung was chosen to lean just a little more on the white space than the one before. Nobody has to skip ahead, and the point isn't to race, it's to learn to love how much a poem can hold.