The kinetic energy of the aptly named Locomotion (the nickname of Lonnie Collins Motion) permeates the 60 poems that tell his sad yet hopeful story. Lonnie's first poem sets up a conflict familiar to anyone who has attempted creativity: despite the cheering of his teacher, Ms. Marcus ("Write it down before it leaves your brain," she says), as he begins to write, Lonnie hears the critical voice of his foster mother ("It's Miss Edna's over and over/ <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Be quiet!"). As Lonnie explores poetry's various forms throughout this brief yet poignant and occasionally humorous volume, he also reveals Miss Edna's kindness toward him in the little things she says and does ("The last time Miss Edna came home and found me/ crying She said <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Think/ <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">about all the stuff you love, Lonnie"). Gradually Lonnie reveals that at age seven, his parents died in a fire, leaving him and his younger sister, Lili, orphaned. Lili was adopted, yet Lonnie figures out a way to visit her regularly. The gradual unfolding of his life's events intermingle with his discoveries about poetry as a form, from haiku to sonnets ("Ms. Marcus says "sonnet" comes from "sonnetto"/ and that sonnetto means little song or sound/ It reminds me of that guy's name Gepetto/ the one who made Pinocchio from wood he found") to the epistle poems he writes to his father and to God. Woodson, through Lonnie, creates (much as Sharon Creech did with the boy narrator in <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Love That Dog) a contagious appreciation for poetry while using the genre as a cathartic means for expressing the young poet's own grief. Ages 10-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Jan.)

Lonnie is grieving and angry about the loss of his parents in a fire four years ago and about his subsequent separation from his beloved little sister, who is in foster care. He expresses his feelings in his fifth-grade poetry-writing class, encouraged by his wonderful teacher Ms. Marcus. In a series of free-verse poems and more formal verse, such as haiku and sonnets, he writes about his life and about the writing that "makes me remember." The framework of the story is fairy-tale idyllic--perfect family before the fire; happy-ever-after foster family by the end of the book--but the poetry is simple and immediate, true to the voice of the lost kid who finds himself with caring people and with words. The line breaks make for very easy reading, and Lonnie talks about those line breaks and about poetry forms, making this ideal for use in classrooms where students are reading and writing poetry. From rap to haiku, Woodson shows and tells that poetry is about who we are.

Like Jack in Creech's Love That Dog, fifth-grader Lonnie has a teacher who introduces him to poetry and makes him believe in his writing. Woodson, however, more ably convinces us that her protagonist really does have a gift. The sixty poems are skillfully and artfully composed--but still manage to sound fresh and spontaneous. The accessible form will attract readers; Woodson's finely crafted story won't let them go.

Count on award-winning Woodson ( Visiting Day , p. 1403, etc.) to present readers with a moving, lyrical, and completely convincing novel in verse. Eleven-year-old Lonnie ("Locomotion") starts his poem book for school by getting it all down fast: "This whole book's a poem 'cause every time I try to / tell the whole story my mind goes Be quiet! / Only it's not my mind's voice, / it's Miss Edna's over and over and over / Be quiet! . . . So this whole book's a poem because poetry's short and / this whole book's a poem 'cause Ms. Marcus says / write it down before it leaves your brain." Lonnie tells readers more, little by little, about his foster mother Miss Edna, his teacher Ms. Marcus, his classmates, and the fire that killed his parents and separated him from his sister. Slowly, his gift for observing people and writing it down lets him start to love new people again, and to widen his world from the nugget of tragedy that it was. Woodson nails Lonnie's voice from the start, and lets him express himself through images and thoughts that vibrate in the different kinds of lines he puts down. He tends to free verse, but is sometimes assigned a certain form by Ms. Marcus. ("Today's a bad day / Is that haiku? Do I look / like I even care?") As in her prose novels, Woodson's created a character whose presence you can feel like they were sitting next to you. And with this first novel-in-verse for her, Lonnie will sit by many readers and teach them to see like he does, "This day is already putting all kinds of words / in your head / and breaking them up into lines / and making the lines into pictures in your mind." Don't let anyone miss this. (Fiction. 9-13)

Gr 4-6-Lonnie Collins Motion, the Locomotion of the title, is a New York City fifth grader with a gifted teacher who assigns her class to write different forms of poetry. The house fire that killed Lonnie's parents and the four years of trauma and slow healing that follow are gradually revealed through his writings. In a masterful use of voice, Woodson allows Lonnie's poems to tell a complex story of loss and grief and to create a gritty, urban environment. Despite the spare text, Lonnie's foster mother and the other minor characters are three-dimensional, making the boy's world a convincingly real one. His reflections touch on poverty and on being African American when whites seem to have the material advantages, and return repeatedly to the pain of living apart from his younger sister. Readers, though, will recognize Lonnie as a survivor. As she did in Miracle Boys (Putnam, 2000), the author places the characters in nearly unbearable circumstances, then lets incredible human resiliency shine through. "I sneak a pen from my back pocket,/bend down low like I dropped something./The chorus marches up behind the preacher/clapping and humming and getting ready to sing./I write the word HOPE on my hand."-Faith Brautigam, Gail Borden Public Library, Elgin, IL Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.