Angel and Hannah (Novel in Verse)

 My Thoughts:

This YA novel in verse is pushed as a "reimagining of Romeo and Juliet," and not in a Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo + Juliet kind of way where the Shakespeare text is brought into a contemporary (at that time) crime tragedy in a made up Verona setting. Instead, this reimagining is more about if Romeo and Juliet were from different cultures and different neighborhoods, what would be the protests against them? Also, if they were strong willed teens who decided to live together, would it work out? 

Unlike Romeo and Juliet, there is no double suicide, but there is more than death that can make this tragic, so perhaps the message here for young readers is really about the wide spaces between cultures and places. Perhaps this is about the residual effects of poverty, culture clashes and a crumbling social structure, but I do not expect readers to get that. I think what they will get from this is a hunger and a lust from the two characters. The poems are intimate and steamy. I wanted the two characters to have unique poet voices or poetry styles, but it is more jazz than hip hop in that at different points, different styles step forward to blast. Once I got used to it, I got it.  It is raw, and young adult readers are hungry for raw. 

From the Publisher:

Hannah, a Korean American girl from Queens, New York, and Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn, fall in love in the spring of 1993 at a quinceañera:

under a torn pink streamer
loose as a tendril of hair—lush—

his eyes. Darkluminous. Warm. A blush
floods her. Hannah sucks in her breath, but
can’t pull back. Music fades. A hush ~
he’s a young buck in the underbrush,

still in a disco ball dance of shadow & light

Their forbidden love instantly and wildly blooms along the Jackie Robinson Expressway.

Told across the changing seasons, Angel & Hannah holds all of the tension and cadence of blank verse while adding dynamic and expressive language rooted in a long tradition of hip-hop and spoken word, creating new and magnetic forms. The poetry of Angel and Hannah’s relationship is dynamic, arresting, observant, and magical, conveying the intimacies and sacrifices of love and family and the devastating realities of struggle and loss.