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.