Book to Share: The Burning Season, by Caroline Starr Rose

Unpopular bookish opinion: I don't care for most novels in verse. 

I've always been a lover of poetry, but verse novels didn't feel like poetry to me, so for a long time I didn't even see the point.

Then Caroline Starr Rose won me over.

Her book, May B., was a verse novel with a really good reason for being told that way.

The main character struggles to read, and her story is small but dramatic and poignant, with a wide emotional arc. All those reasons made its format make sense, and the writing was beautiful. I loved it.

I felt the same way about Rose's second verse novel, Blue Birds, about the friendship between a Roanoke girl, Kimi, and English settler, Alis. Because the girls don't speak one another's languages, the sparse verse made total sense to me and allowed me to fall into the story without being distracted by the format. 

So of course when I found out Caroline Starr Rose had a new verse novel coming out, you know I jumped right on the chance to read it! The Burning Season is possibly my favorite of her verse novels, with a realistic and relatable main character in a setting and situation very different from my life.

Like Rose's previous novels in verse, The Burning Season makes perfect sense in this format. The verses are an excellent medium to tell a fairly "small" story, of a girl training to become a Wildfire spotter despite her deep fear of fire. The swings from quiet introspection and normal life hopes to the high drama of raging fires and missing family members are perfectly mirrored by the shape and structure of each poem.

Additionally, the sense of place in this novel is as much a part of the story as the plot. The poems bring the Gila Wilderness to life with a subtlety and clarity that perhaps only a poem can provide.

So if you're not a big fan of novels in verse…you're not alone. But give this one a try.

Here's a more detailed plot summary from the publisher's description, if you're curious!

Twelve-year-old Opal has a she’s deathly afraid of fire. Still Opal is preparing to become a fourth-generation lookout on Wolf Mountain, deep in the New Mexico wilderness. She, Mom, and Gran live at ten thousand feet in a single room at the top of a fire tower. They are responsible for spotting any hint of smoke before it becomes an uncontrollable blaze. 
Instead of training for the lonely life of a lookout, Opal wishes she could be starting seventh grade in Silver City, attending real classes with kids her own age and even going to afterschool clubs like FFA. But Wolf Mountain has other ideas. When Mom makes the long trek to town for supplies and Gran goes missing, Opal is the only one to spot a tell-tale spiral of smoke moving up the mountainside. She’ll have to be braver than she’s ever been as she heads into the woods, beyond Wolf Ridge’s old blackened burn scar, to face down a fire on her own. But when a fire is what took her father away, and Opal herself knows the sting of smoke and lick of flames, how can she be brave enough when it really counts?

The Burning Season releases in May but is available for preorder now. Thanks, Netgalley, for the chance to read it early!

For more Marvelous Middle Grade Monday recommendations, check out Always in the Middle: http://gpattridge.com
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