By reading a novel written in verse, as is Virginia Euwer Wolff's Make Lemonade, I cannot help but initially try to analyze it for its poetic merit. Personally, I am not fond of novels of verse. While Make Lemonade has very enjoyable episodes, reading for pleasure is difficult for me. With YA novels, so many genres are lumped into this marketing category -- romance, poetry, adventure, et cetera. If this book was geared toward adults, it would have been marketed as poetry rather than a YA novel in verse. I read poetry differently than I do prose and the whole time while I read this, I kept trying to think of ways I had to make sense of it. However, I do feel that the most enjoyable aspect was listening to people read it out loud in class as it allowed the poetry to leap off the page.
I do appreciate what Wolff has done with these books -- as an artistic venture, her novel in verse allows individual episodes strikes a chord independently from the rest of the novel, if need be. I still hold that 12 is my favorite, as I felt very connected to the idea of LaVaughn's anxiety being represented by Zimbabwe taking away the points from her. I think there is something relatable about Make Lemonade -- the teenagers can related to the verse. I do tend to think of all the writing teenagers can do, even if it's angsty poetry about high school. In that manner, I do think there is something appealing to teenagers about this book.
2 comments:
I actually really liked it because I think I had a completely opposite initial approach to it than you did. Instead of thinking of it as poetry first, and then a novel, I thought of it as a novel that happens to be in verse... this made it easier for me to get into it without analyzing too much as I went along. I can imagine that reading it as you did, and focusing so much on the poems as single entities, would have made it so much harder to read. It's so interesting how two people can look at the same thing so differently and have such a different experience with the same text!
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