Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
From the Publisher
Blade never asked for a life of the rich and famous. In fact, he’d give anything not to be the son of Rutherford Morrison, a washed-up rock star and drug addict with delusions of a comeback. Or to no longer be part of a family known most for lost potential, failure, and tragedy, including the loss of his mother. The one true light is his girlfriend, Chapel, but her parents have forbidden their relationship, assuming Blade will become just like his father. In reality, the only thing Blade and Rutherford have in common is the music that lives inside them. And songwriting is all Blade has left after Rutherford, while drunk, crashes his high school graduation speech and effectively rips Chapel away forever. But when a long-held family secret comes to light, the music disappears. In its place is a letter, one that could bring Blade the freedom and love he’s been searching for, or leave him feeling even more adrift.
Kwame Alexander
Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, and the New York Times bestselling author of 28 books, including Swing, Solo, and Rebound, the follow-up to his Newbery Medal-winning middle grade novel, The Crossover. The 2018 NEA Read Across America Ambassador, Kwame is also the host and producer of the literary variety/talk show, Bookish, which airs on Facebook Watch, and the Founding Editor of VERSIFY, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers.
Mary Rand Hess
Mary Rand Hess is a poet, mixed-media artist, screenwriter, and New York Times bestselling author of Solo and Animal Ark: Celebrating Our Wild World in Poetry and Pictures, both coauthored with Kwame Alexander.
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
Reviews with images
Identity and Belonging
A novel in verse, mostly free with reflections on music tracks woven in, this is Blade's journey from Hollywood to Ghana just after graduating high school. Named after a comic book character, this narrative is not a comic though Blade's texts with his sister Storm have some humorous-sometimes-serious sibling tensions.The big question here, that teen readers may not immediately relate to is this: what does it mean to have a rock-star father? Or this, more relate-able question: what does it mean to have a father who is battling grief and regret alone and how does this impact a family? While the story is about Blade making sense of who he is and what it means to love, it is just as much about family, secrets, recovery, and forgiveness.I appreciate the writing here -- seems more sensory, figurative than other Alexander verse novels, perhaps because this is co-written or more likely because the characters are music-lovers. Many pages have lots of white space for the reader to imagine other perspectives, fill in the gaps, and notice the limited perspective sometimes of Blade. The text-messaging pages have a lot of white space -- seem rather lonely to me, wanting or reaching for a connection that is partial. I think this works well for representing Blade's wanting, feeling partial -- when essentially we are all "solo" and need to reconcile that while being a part of a family-community also grappling with existential questions of identity and belonging.As a junior high teacher, I think this book fits nicely with middle school readers who are imagining, stretching into high school. I don't think the main character need be the same age as the reader for a book to be "appropriate" for a certain age. I am not a fan of whole-class reading -- let students choose what they read and when. I'd have a handful of copies of this book in the classroom for students who love music, who write poetry/songs, who have parents with addictions, who loved The Crossover and Booked (sports-centered verse novels by the same author).
