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How To Read a Verse Novel (And Why You Should)
Verse novels are great for people who don’t like poetry!
Have you ever read a verse novel? Or are you put off by the fact that it’s poetry? Because lots of people were taught to either dislike poetry at school, or steer clear of it because it’s “too hard”.
But verse novels are a great way to dip your toe in the poetry ocean, because the poems or verses are focused just as much on story as they are on language, so they are immediately accessible. And enjoyable.
When you first pick up a verse novel, you’ll probably think it’s a collection of poems. Many verse novels have poems with titles (mine do). People often ask me if the way to read it is just to dip in and out.
The answer is no, because, just like a prose novel, a verse novel tells a story, so you need to start at the beginning and read through to the end. Someone once suggested that a reading a verse novel is like reading a lot of tiny chapters, which I think is a great description.
You will find that it is both a fast and a slow read. Sounds weird? A verse novel might have between 40 and 100 poems (Farm Kid has about 40, Sixth Grade Style Queen (Not!) has about 60, YA verse novels can have quite a few more), of which many will be quite short. So you could read a verse novel quite quickly if you wanted to.
But…
