That said, Solo is a YA novel, and so that level of lyrical virtuosity would perhaps be out of place. Solo is one of two verse novels I’ve read in recent weeks and the other, Mr Either/Or by Aaron Poochigian, features a more free-wheeling, complex style, which was slightly more to my taste. The poetic style is simple the vocabulary is certainly accessible to the intended teenage audience, although I sometimes yearned for something a little more nuanced. The final act, somewhat incongruously, takes Blade to Ghana, a location he may have thought would be safe from his father’s antics, but guess what? For a novel in this form, it’s quite long, but these seismic shifts in action and location serve to maintain the reader’s interest.

sees Blade graduating, via yet another humiliating appearance from Rutherford, while the mid-section is rocked by a revelation that calls Blade to question everything he previously believed about his family. Solo splits clearly into sections, like the songs Blade writes break into verse, bridge and chorus. Rutherford may not have much time left, before Aside from his father’s mortifying antics, Blade still mourns the death of his mother some years before (because no teen in YA is allowed to have both parents still living) and grapples with his father’s ability to create carnage in more ways than one when Blade’s girlfriend comes under pressure to break up with him based on a strongly held parental belief in that old adage, “like father, like son.” In terms of the first of these potential stumbling blocks, protagonist Blade Morrison’s story lends itself to the verse novel on the basis of him being an aspiring songwriter and son of Rutherford Morrison, legendary rock star, alcoholic and not particularly impressive parent. I will be forcing Solo in front of my teenage students to see how this plays out. On the other hand, a verse novel is inevitably shorter than a traditionally written one, which means it will only take a third of the time to read, which might prove a happy compromise with those reluctant readers. It also needs to not just be a spurious exercise in authorial grandstanding there needs to be a believable reason for the novel to written in verse rather than prose. Writing a YA verse novel seems to me a risky strategy, given that the one thing guaranteed to make my teenage students claim a total lack of comprehension is poetry.

Solo by kwame alexander