I don't really have problems. Not, like, life-threatening or even life-ruining ones. But I have a lot of things that happen to me that are very annoying. After five days of sub-zero windchill here in Chicago, as I was reading 2015 Newbery medalist and Coretta Scott King Medal finalist The Crossover, a pipe burst in our basement. Annoying, but not the end of the world. Had to shut off the water, get a plumber in, get contractors in to clean up and rebuild stuff, very annoying, but honestly, all of it was covered by my insurance, so what reason do I even have to complain?
You know what the most annoying part of all of this is? That same pipe burst exactly a year ago, and it took months to get everything fixed and rebuilt because, as often happens when you own a home, trying to fix one problem often leads to uncovering another one, and things cascade from there and the expenses keep piling up, and it takes months and months before everything is back the way it was. It took us six months from the pipe bursting to finally being able to put the basement office back together again. Again, an inconvenience more than anything else, but inconveniences are still not fun.
Still, throughout those six months, we did take an awful lot of steps to try and prevent this exact same thing from happening again at the exact same time a year later. We got new, better insulation, and then when we realized it was not exactly the right kind of insulation, we tore it out again and got newer, better-er insulation put in for a second time. We made sure the space was heated properly. We knew when to drip our faucets. We shut off the outdoor spigots at the right time. And it still wasn’t enough. We did everything right, and the pipe burst again anyways. We thought we had it fixed, and we didn’t, nothing we did was going to fix it. And we are getting it fixed again, and we’re taking extra steps to prevent it from happening again, and it will probably burst again in a year.
Again, it’s an inconvenience, one that we’re lucky we have the resources to address, albeit slowly, and one where it could have gone so much worse - more things could have been damaged, the needed repairs could have been more extensive. But it’s a frustrating inconvenience, similar to the one I described in an earlier piece, the kind of thing where it takes so much time and effort to fix it and then it still isn’t fixed. You thought you had addressed it, but you get the feeling that nothing you do will ever be good enough to get to the point where you can stop worrying yourself awake every time it gets below twenty degrees outside. I’m not saying “woe is me”, my life is good and comfortable and I’m surrounded by people I love. But this sucks.
So when this pipe burst, my wife put it to me like this: if I had to make a list of everything in my life that sucked, it would be a pretty manageable list. Like, I wouldn’t trade that list with anyone else. And she’s right, I wouldn’t. But, as I pointed out to her at the time, I would consider, if possible, trading specific items on the list away.
The Crossover is narrated entirely in verse by rapping middle school basketball phenomenon Josh “Filthy McNasty” Bell. It reads extremely quickly, and it’s excellent, which is great because I feel that there are so many ways that a novel like this could have been terrible. But Alexander absolutely nails it. Where “novels in verse”, especially for young readers, run the risk of being too emo and overwritten, or too showy because the author wants to dazzle everyone with how good a stylist he is, everything in Crossover is told in extremely short, vivid scenes; the chapters fly by and are themselves sorted into four “quarters”, which fly by themselves. Alexander has done a great job bending the “novel in verse” format into a device for stripping away everything unnecessary or bulky.
Crossover also stands out from most of the Newbery medalists of the past twenty years because the main characters read as extremely authentic children. When you read all of the Newbery medalists in a row, you run into a lot of young protagonists with varying levels of unrealistic precociousness, and in particular when you read books by authors like Kate DiCamillo or Susan Patron, it's hard to get past how grating some of these characters are, with their repeated non-sequitur invocations of “seal blubber” or hobby of studying and tying particularly interesting knots. In contrast to that, Josh is a breath of fresh air. He’s a kid and he likes playing basketball; this is not to say that he’s a flat or overly simple character: as we’ll see in the novel, he has plenty of complex qualities and feels plenty of conflicting emotions throughout the course of the novel. But he doesn’t have a bunch of crappy quirks that feel shoved into the story in the name of making him “interesting”.
More importantly, I feel like it would have been easy for a worse writer than Alexander to turn in a Bluford High-style portrait of Black American misery and call that literary fiction. But that’s not what we have here. The main conflict is between Josh and his twin brother and teammate Jordan, and that conflict is basically “they're kind of dicks to each other because they're crushing on the same girl”. Just like New Kid, which would win a Newbery five years later, it's a story about young black men that isn't about misery and suffering: Josh and Jordan led very different lives than I did, because I was not a local celebrity known for my sick crossovers, but they have loving families and friends and a community that respects them, and they lead relatively comfortable lives, and guess what just like you they have to deal with their dickish brother and overbearing dad. The world is bigger than you think and you're not alone in it.
So then there's Josh and Jordan's dad, who used to play pro ball in the Euroleague and now, having been out for years due to a knee injury, has dedicated all of his time to developing his two sons as players. Again, this story could have been miserable, could have been about a sad sack father wrestling with his own impotence and taking it out on his sons. But that's not the case here: Josh and Jordan’s dad clearly loves them and wants what's best for them, even if he does occasionally come out of the stands during the game to yell at the refs. Every place where Alexander could have decided to go bleak, he instead decides to put familial love and dedication into his story. It's wonderful, and it doesn't weaken the story. There's an awful lot of conflict and pressure and character development that you can wring out of a middle school crush and a dad pushing you to be a great athlete and a brother who is really starting to grate on you, and none of it feels contrived. And, to be honest, I've read a lot of very miserable Newbery medalists, and it's nice to read one where, if I wrote out all of Josh and Jordan's problems in a list, I feel pretty confident that they wouldn't trade that list for anyone else's. Well, certainly not any protagonists of other Newbery winners.
But this doesn't mean their lives are a walk in the park. Sure, we don't directly see poverty or systemic racism in the lives of the Bell family, but something else much more immediate is looming throughout the novel, and again, Alexander could have chosen something that had been in the background of plenty of other, more cliched novels. But the looming terror in this novel isn’t prejudice, or poverty, or shaken self-confidence; it’s the dad’s hypertension. Which isn’t to say that this is a novel about young Black men that ignores or elides race; Dad’s condition is, of course, particularly common among Black patients, and Dad’s own distrust of doctors contributes not only to the premature end of his basketball career, but his health problems throughout The Crossover. But putting hypertension at the center of the conflict is not only a unique choice from Alexander, but it’s one that allows him to keep the Bell family’s love central to the story as well. This is a family with problems, but the family wants to help each other solve those problems, and there is no question at any point in the novel that the family will be there for each other through those problems.
Look, the pipe isn’t that big of a deal. Nobody was hurt, we caught it early, insurance paid for most of the repairs. I’m lucky I have insurance. I’m lucky I have the money to cover my ass when something stupid like this happens. More than that, I’m lucky that my wife is here to calm me down when I panic over every leaky pipe and every thing that goes wrong in our house. I’m lucky that she reminds me of the good things I have in my life. I’m lucky that I have her in my life so that I have a reason to keep it together and a reason to still try and be a person even when I fall apart after something goes wrong. I’m lucky that I have two kids that I get to play with every day, that every night when I go to sleep, I get to say to myself that if I end up dead tomorrow, I got to spend my last full day playing with my family and eating dinner with my family and spending time with the people that I love.
My favorite chapter in The Crossover is this one:
“In this game of life
your family is the court
and the ball is your heart.
No matter how good you are,
no matter how down you get,
always leave
your heart
on the court.”
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1993 medalist, Missing May by Cynthia Rylant.