Walking on Glass, by Alma Fullerton, continued + The Cybils

In my review of Walking on Glass, by Alma Fullerton, I wondered whether she herself considered what she wrote to be "blank verse." So I brazenly emailed her to ask. Here is her answer:

"Some people may call it poetry, others may not. I chose
my words carefully while writing it, but the story is written in the point
of view of a 16 year old. He wasn't a poet, he was a boy so above all I
tried to stay true to him and his voice."

It's a slippery slope, this business of trying to draw lines between poetry and prose. I shall continue to think of Walking on Glass as powerfully arranged prose, and shall report back to the ya nominating committee for the Cybils Awards (of which I am proud to be a member) that I don't think we have to give this one to Poetry.

Speaking of the Cybils, if you haven't gone over to the Cybils to nominate your favorite books published in 2007, you've still got until November 21 (you can only nominate one book in each category, so if you have multiple books you like, you could cunningly wait to the end, to see if some of them get nominated by other people). My group only has 90 or so ya books to read, so there's room for more (!?). The reading seems to be going well. We have a google spreadsheet of all the titles, and we add x-es under our names when we've read a book, and the x-es are building up nicely. Not that I am competitive or anything, but I have been reading hard so as to put more x-es under my name. I realize that this is not the point, but I like adding x-es.

Instead of writing reviews of all the great books I have read last week, I have to prepare for a presentation I'm giving tomorrow on using archaeology in the classroom. If anyone is interested in using archaeology in the classroom, let me know and I can send you stuff.