CROSSING STONES, by Helen Frost

CROSSING STONES
by Helen Frost

(Frances Foster Books/FSG)

Eighteen-year-old Muriel Jorgensen lives on one side of Crabapple Creek. Her family’s closest friends, the Normans, live on the other. For as long as Muriel can remember, the families’ lives have been intertwined, connected by the crossing stones that span the water...

So there I am, enjoying a sensitive multi-voice story in verse set in Michigan during World War One. A taste of the women's suffrage movement here, a dash of Spanish Influenza there -- just the kind of historical novel I like. Helen Frost's walloped me with her poetic prowess twice before, but this time I'm grooving on the story, thinking I've got her bag of tricks all figured out. You see, some of the chapter-poems in Crossing Stones are laid out in a zig-zaggy creek-like pattern, while others are shaped like stones:

Nifty visual metaphor going on there, right?

And then I read the Notes on the Form at the end and by God if Helen hasn't done it to me all over again. Remember The Braid? Turns out there's a similar heap of stealth poetry going on right in front of my nose in Crossing Stones: those rounded poems scattered among the free verse zig-zags are in fact "cupped-hand sonnets" with fourteen lines apiece and perfectly steadfast rhyme schemes. As if that's not enough, shared rhymes from those individual poems interlace one sonnet with the next in a way I am far too lazy to describe. Besides, part of me thinks I shouldn't even be crowing about all these wonderments, seeing as so much of the wonder comes from the fact that none of Helen's structural acrobatics interferes in the least with the story itself. She's subtle, that Helen Frost. And crazy-brilliant. Seriously, who else even thinks of this kind of thing, much less pulls it off?

(Available in September)