Keesha's House

Frost, Helen. Keesha's House. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.


Annotation: Seven teenagers run away from home for seven different reasons and all wind up at Keesha's house, a fellow runaway..

Justification for rejection: I love poetry - when it's short and a little bit odd (or a lot...), but not so much as a storytelling device. Keeping this bias in mind, I approached Keesha's House with extra care but still, I disliked it - as an adult reader. The teen I was would have loved it. Here's why:

I found the menu of troubled teenage tribulations present in this work to be overdone - having homosexuality, drug dealing, incest, pregnancy, murder, and alcoholism all touched on very briefly in a short book is too reminiscent of "True Confessions" magazine for me to respect it. As a young teen, however, I loved "True Confessions" because I could vicariously experience someone else's tragedy through its sordid stories and thus escape my own. Frost's use of poetry has potential to counteract this tabloid effect, but she didn't pull it off. The seven teenagers' voices didn't vary enough to bring them into full focus as individual characters and eventually they all blurred into one in my head, sounding like the same brave-and-hopeful-yet-resigned and grown-up-too-fast victims for me to distinguish each from the other. Had there been more anger and/or more flaws evident in the teens that all found their way to Keesha's house, I'd feel differently. Instead, Keesha's House takes the same narrow and sentimental approach to too many complicated issues at once and doesn't provide remarkable insight into a single one as a result.

Genre: Problem/poetry/edgy.