Rebound by Kwame Alexander

From Goodreads,

"Before Josh and Jordan Bell were streaking up and down the court, their father was learning his own moves. In this prequel to Newbery Medal winner The Crossover, Chuck Bell takes center stage, as readers get a glimpse of his childhood and how he became the jazz music worshipping, basketball star his sons look up to."

Goodreads - Rebound

I absolutely love seeing my students get excited about books.  The week after our spring break I received our Scholastic book order and my kids were excited.  They are always excited to see what their new book club book is going to be and of course they are always excited to see what books I ordered for myself and for our library.  As I was unboxing and sorting books, my students were watching.  I pulled this book out of the box and one of my students said, "Uh... is that Rebound?  The book that goes with The Crossover?"  I smiled and said "Yes."  She dramatically fell in the floor and begged me to let her read it right that minute.  I told her I was going to read it first before putting it in the library.  Every day she asked me if I had finished it.  When I finally did she excitedly snatched the book off my desk and started reading it promptly.  It's the little moments that make a difference.  And luckily this book made a huge difference for one child.

This book is the prequel to the book The Crossover.  This book takes place in the 80s and follows Chuck Bell, the father of the twins in The Crossover.  He experiences a traumatic event that follows him and begins affecting his attitude.  His mom makes the difficult decision to send Chuck to live with his grandparents.  While at his grandparents he finds that he has a knack for basketball that he didn't think he had in him.  Being with his grandparents allows him to focus on himself and the rebound he needs to move forward in life.

This book was a good prequel, but I really wish I had read it before reading The Crossover.  I loved that in this book Chuck enjoyed reading comics, and throughout the book there were comics of Chuck playing basketball.  Graphic novels are becoming more and more relevant in children's books and I think it is great that Kwame incorporated this into this book.  I felt like the comics throughout the book really broke up the monotony of the book and the poetry.  Plus, it makes the book more interesting to students because there are "pictures" in the book.

One of the things that I didn't like about this book was the ending.  I didn't like how the book suddenly jumped to present day when The Crossover was taking place.  I was reading along and suddenly we were in present day and it was Jordan and Josh who were telling the story.  That really bothered me because I felt like it was a consistent story.  It definitely took me a minute to figure out what was happening and who was even talking.  However, I did like that Kwame made all the final connections to The Crossover.

I'm glad that I read this book, and honestly I feel like some of my students would love to have other books of Kwame Alexander's in my library.  I would love to have a class set of these books so that I could do a novel study over them.  It would be highly beneficial to study the content and poetry.  I give this book 4 out of 5 stars and I'm definitely excited to hear what my student has to say about this book.