Sold

Content Warning: This Background section discusses child sex trafficking.

A “novel in verse” is a specific genre of novel written in poetic form rather than typical prose paragraphs. Some novels in verse might take the form of an epic poem, where the text is not divided up into sections like chapters or individual poems but is instead just one long poem. Other novels in verse, such as Sold, are divided up into individually titled poems. However, these smaller poems serve the function of traditional chapters in the novel and are similarly designed to tell parts of the same story, rather than being unrelated pieces, as is usual with a standard collection of poetry.

Because such novels are entirely made up of poems, they tend to feature many of the same literary devices as poetry in general. For example, novels in verse make use of line breaks, imagery, repetition, sensual details, and figurative language such as simile and metaphor. While they may not be as plot-heavy as traditional novels, they still tell a coherent story, but unlike a traditional novel’s focus on plot structure, novels in verse tend to focus more on sensory details and characters’ emotions. Thus, they often deviate from traditional plot structures and can display a far more fluid sense of chronology. (Sold, however, does have a fairly linear sense of plot structure overall.) Examples of recent famous novels in verse include Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse (1997), Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (1998), Crank by Ellen Hopkins (2004), and The Crossover by Kwame Alexander (2014). However, book-length works written in verse, or epic poems, have existed for millennia and include such famous works such as the Bible, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey (c. 7th or 8th century BCE), Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (c. 1321), and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). After prose became the dominant genre, verse lost popularity in comparison to book-length works, but it is now experiencing a renaissance in the form of novels in verse, especially within the MG and YA genres. This is perhaps because, with the advent of the internet and the waning attention span of teenagers, it is easier to digest book-length works in smaller doses with a lower overall word count.