THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY

Levithan, David. The Realm of Possibility. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2004.

Annotation: A deep and thoughtful glimpse inside the hearts and minds of twenty different teens all looking for acceptance, friendship, and love.

Nomination: I would like to nominate David Levithan's The Realm of Possibility for the Mock Printz award because of it's touching and hopeful message despite the verse layout. Getting any biases out of the way...I am not a fan of the verse-as-novel genre. To me the style is simply another way of writing less-structured short-stories. However, The Realm of Possibility takes that style one step further which made it much more interesting than I originally anticipated.

The novel is broken into five chapters. Each chapter contains four personal teenage works from the mind of Levithan. There is poetry, free verse, and lyrics among the twenty different stories. Some are funny and some are somber. The common thread through them all is the long-standing teenage aspiration for acceptance; either from a friend, a lover, or society as a whole. There is the boy who's girlfriend is in love with a 20th century novel character and no matter what he does to impress her, he will never measure up to one H. Caulfield. There are the lyrics of love from one girl to another. And there is the burgeoning gay relationship between Daniel and Jed as they struggle to figure out themselves and eachother.

The Realm of Possibility thoughtfully and honestly addresses the mixed up and overblown urgency of the teenage mind. It stirred up those difficult and solitary emotions of teenagedom that, now as adults, we recognize as being universal. It's a refreshing reminder that at one point in our lives there was the feeling that anything is possible.