A bright-orange tour bus is hard to miss. Even more so when it’s branded Rebound—the title of the new book by Kwame Alexander. In the book, Charlie Bell can’t seem to make the right choices after a family tragedy. But then he spends the summer with grandparents, using his newfound love of basketball to get back on track. Rebound is told through poems describing Charlie’s summer. “I think basketball is poetry in motion,” Alexander says. “So I thought how cool it was to combine these two things.”
Alexander spoke with TFK Kid Reporter Marley Alburez (both pictured, above). He said the book was inspired by his mother’s death. “I’m trying to rebound in my own life, so I wrote a story about a kid trying to rebound in his.”
The novel is a prequel to The Crossover, which won the 2015 Newbery Medal. But Alexander says you don’t have to read that book to understand his latest.
Alexander’s advice to readers? “There are a bunch of books out there, you just gotta search for the ones that you really like and read them.”
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