Nick's mom is a horse trainer who has been unemployed since they moved into the city for his Dad's job. He learns despite himself, but he resents the obligation. Nick's father is a professor who has written a dictionary of unique words, and part of what Nick hates about the world is that he has to read a few pages every night. He and his best friend Coby excel at soccer, but their whole lives are not consumed by it. Nick is an eighth-grader who loves soccer. So you must come into the book expecting a middle-grade novel.

That being said, Kwame Alexander is writing this as a middle-grade book to get boys more interested in reading. There is often a density to the lines that says more than one thing at a time. Which shows how much space is on the page. This one was 326 pages but only 2 hours and 36 minutes in audiobook. Like many of these novels in verse, there are a lot of pages, but the audio is pretty short. Kids do get poetry, or at least they can get poetry if taught well, and it is interesting for them. Anyone that had been a teen pouring over lyrics trying to understand exactly what they were saying and what it means knows that this isn't true. I bring this up because one of the complaints I have heard is that either kids are not interested in poetry or cannot really understand the lyrical depth of poetry. She would have to bracket the conversations by asking whether the line abstracted from the movie is an idiom or tends to be used in a hyperbolic way, and then ask, 'Was there actually any clouds in the sky? Then he said there were no clouds in the sky?' The artists were often very literal in their representation of the lyrics, likely more literal than Lin Manuel Miranda may have intended.

She told me last night that there were multiple arguments about whether one line or another was figurative or literal or hyperbolic or some other characteristic. At the same time, our understanding of the lyrics is influenced by the movie's visuals. The students know all the songs, and they can analyze the lyrics differently than they would if they were coming at poetry without any history. My wife is teaching a unit on figurative language to 5th graders right now, and she is using the lyrics of songs from Encanto. And their audio often has a better orientation to the intention of the author's writing than what I would do for myself. I likely should fully read them in print and fully listen to them because there are often hidden aspects of the verse in the print layout. But I also try to read enough of them in print to get a sense of the poetic style. I mostly listen to these as audiobooks because hearing them read rightly feels like the most authentic choice. Kwame Alexander has been the author of most of them, but also the memoir in verse Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. I like the audio versions of novels in verse.

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