Amber Appleton’s got it rough, and when I say she’s got it rough, I mean rough: the girl lives out of a bus ever since asshole Oliver kicked her and her mom out of his place. Now mom’s back out there, looking for a steady man (and a place to crash).

But don’t let that fool you. Amber is a tough cookie and one of the most upbeat and positive chicks around. Her best friends are a group of guys with varying degrees of problems – the kid with autism and so forth – and she’s tight with Jesus who she remembers from a set of books she got as a child where he is nothing but a rock star. Oh, and she’s tight with Father Chee, the minister at the Korean Catholic Church in the ghetto and with Private Jackson, an old man who served in Vietnam and writes haiku for fun.

But Amber’s life is turned upside down when her mother gets involved with the wrong guy.

Sorta Like a Rock Star is the kind of book that will smack you in the face. It’s slow paced at the beginning with Amber’s inner dialog a bit meandering. She’s got a habit of using some words for emphasis again and again which grated on me. I couldn’t quite get her or what she was going for with it, but I trudged onward. There was just enough personality to Amber and enough intrigue by her to push through.

By part three of Quick’s novel, though, everything changes. Amber’s routine and what she’s come to see as stable things in an otherwise unpredictable life dismantle and the styling and pacing race along. One of the biggest stables in her life is permanently removed, and the second one comes close too. Her voice shifts from the one of positivity to nothing at all, and she stops attending school, her volunteer shifts at the church, and her job all together. This is where, as a reader, I really came to understand Amber. Where I was unsure of her in the first two parts, I was completely engrossed by her story and her pain from this part forward.

But don’t worry – this book isn’t all about pain. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. When Amber was the strength in a lot of other people’s lived, despite the things she herself faced, people took note and in time, that favor is returned to her in ways she cannot fathom.

Sorta Like a Rock Star is the kind of novel you hand sell to your readers. There is a lot going on inside it, but it takes a patient reader to unlock everything that happens. I think a lot of readers may see themselves in Amber’s mental position, working through a lot of challenges in their own lives but maintaining some spot of hope things will look up. The relationships Amber develops within her community are authentic and the interactions among her own peers realistic and, at times, heartbreaking. She works for the underdog and she, too, is the underdog.

Try this one out on your fans of Jandy Nelson’s The Sky is Everywhere. They aren’t exactly readalikes, but they do share many elements, including relationship building through grief, the use of poetry as a coping mechanism, and patience as a reader, rewarded in the end. I’d suggest being prepared here to both have a laugh a bit and maybe even cry a bit, but you will walk away knowing Amber is real.

True? True.

What do you get when you mix a 14-year-old baseball playing poet with a hot girlfriend and a budding interest in a poet he meets at an open mic night? You get one heck of a fun book.

Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs by Ron Koertge is told through verse, and it’s done in a way that casual readers can appreciate, as can people like me who know quite a bit about poetry and poetic form. Kevin is a baseball player whose team will be lucky enough to make the playoffs this year. When his dad — a writer — gives him a blank journal and suggests he use it to write through the grief he has because of the loss of his mother, Kevin kind of scoffs at the idea. We know he doesn’t really though. He embraces it, and he uses it to write poems he’ll perform at an open mic . . . where he meets Amy, a girl who grabs his interest immediately, making him rethink his relationship with Mira. Until, that is, he finds out Amy has a boyfriend.

What Koertge has done is create a funny and lovable character in Kevin. We get to know him quite well because of his poetry. Although at times I wavered back and forth about his believability as a 14 year old boy, I ultimately was taken back to the many creative writing programs I was in throughout my teen years and realized I knew more than one Kevin. He’s a funny guy, with a passion for the typical guy things, but he’s also open and frank about his interest in his creative side, whether it is poetry, painting, or theater. This is a rare voice to hear in teen lit and have it become so believable, too.

The romance that emerges in this book is sweet and clean. Kevin really likes Mira, his current girlfriend, but his interest in Amy grows the more he communicates with her through poetry. He runs through scenarios of how he’ll break the news to Mira that he wants to end their relationship, but either he won’t follow through or the idea will blow up in his face in a funny manner.

Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs is incredibly fast paced, but it’s the type of book that when I finished, I wanted to go back and read again more slowly. I wanted to appreciate Koertge’s metapoetry throughout — he writes poetry about poetry but he’s able to do it through the eyes of Kevin, too, making it poetry about poetry about poetry, in a sense. Readers unfamiliar with poetic formats will actually learn quite a bit in reading this one. Kevin shows off his pantoum skills, his sestina skills (which, random fact, is my favorite poetic form), and even rare styles of couplets.

When I dove into this title, I didn’t realize it was a sequel to an earlier title. This is a book you can read without having read the first, and it’s one that will compel you to go read it afterward. I really thought Kevin was a fantastic character, and I liked the relationship he had with his father, too. His father is transitioning from widow to dating again; for many readers, Kevin’s ideas about this will resonate as feelings they, too, may have had from time to time.

Pass this book off to your fans of clean, funny reads. Readers who love the verse format or readers who are themselves writers and poets will want to read this title, too. And while Kevin is a baseball player, the sports themselves are sort of a side thought, so those who may be reluctant to read a sports story shouldn’t fear. On the other hand, sports readers may find themselves loving this, too: there’s just enough to get them in, and the cover only helps. You better believe I’m not returning this one back to the library just yet — it’s inspired me to revisit poetry and try some of the styles I’ve not played with in a while.