[Simon Hunt]

At the barber shop yesterday, I read a blurb in Time magazine praising a new verse novel for the "Young Adult market", and it seemed to me that I've seen rather a lot of such announcements of late. Well, that might be overstating it. Certainly verse novels for teenagers aren't likely to outsell manga, celebrity autobiographies, or books with funny pictures of cats any time soon. But it does seem to me (and it's confirmed by almost two full minutes of research on Wikipedia) that

1) the verse novel has made a bit of a comeback in recent years;
and
2) verse novels aimed at teenagers are disproportionately represented in that comeback.

Anybody else notice this? Or have any sense of what, if anything, it "means"? Or have any recently published verse novels to recommend?

[Jennifer Reeser]

Simon, I am the author of a novel in verse, titled, "The Lalaurie Horror." It has been far and away my most successful, commercially. It debuted as a bestseller at Amazon, in the "epic" category, and remained on multiple bestseller lists, until only a few months ago. I still receive royalties every single month, from both the print and digital editions.

So, at least in my case, what you say is true.

Jennifer

[Tony Barnstone]

Simon,

I saw a really good talk by Marilyn Nelson on this. She writes these and she says that there is a very good -- commercial! -- market for them these days. She mentioned another YA verse novelist whose work was being considered for film and asked, "When was the last time you heard a poet talking about film rights?"

There is definitely something here, and from my little dipping of the toe into reading in the area I have seen that a number of these are verse novels in metrical form.

I talked to a middle school librarian about it a few years back and she said that the students love them--in part because they deal with tough subject matter, and in part because there are fewer words on the page.

Interesting!

Best, Tony