collected
About 7 h 45 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 16 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
In Harlem, fifteen-year-old Xiomara Batista keeps a notebook of poems she cannot share with her devout Dominican mother, whose Catholic rules leave little room for questions about faith or desire. Her feelings for Aman, her biology lab partner, become another secret. An invitation to her school's slam poetry club offers somewhere to speak freely, but attending means defying her mother's restrictions.
Told in first-person poems, this YA coming-of-age novel reads with the directness and rhythmic energy of spoken-word performance. First love includes kissing and sexual touching without intercourse. The intimate voice can also be angry and painful: sexual harassment and parental abuse are serious parts of Xiomara's daily life.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Highly regarded
Not really, the first-person poems use direct language and the rhythmic energy of spoken-word performance. The story moves briskly through a linear sequence of vignettes, though Xiomara’s experiences can be emotionally intense.
Strong parental abuse and sexual harassment are serious parts of Xiomara’s daily life, and her voice can be angry and painful. First love includes mild sexual content: kissing and sexual touching without intercourse.
Religion shapes Xiomara’s conflict with her devout Dominican mother, whose Catholic rules restrict questions about faith and desire. Keeping poems and romantic feelings secret, and deciding whether to attend slam poetry club, bring those tensions into her daily choices.
The voice is intimate and earnest, with the rhythmic energy of spoken-word performance. Xiomara’s poems give the coming-of-age story a tense, sometimes angry and painful feel, alongside a hopeful tone and a focus on creativity.
About 384 pages in the HarperTeen 2020 edition. The first-person poems and brisk sequence of vignettes shape how it reads at that length.
HarperTeen · 2020 · paperback. ISBN 9780062662811.
About 7 hours 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 384-page HarperTeen edition. Dense books can take longer.
Elizabeth Acevedo is an American poet and novelist whose young adult fiction combines close attention to cadence with direct, character-centered storytelling. Before publishing these novels, she taught eighth graders in Maryland’s Prince George’s County and saw how a narrow range of represented lives shaped her students’ encounters with books. That experience provides useful context for writing that centers young women’s voices, ambitions, and negotiations with family expectations. In The Poet X, private writing helps a teenager reckon with religion, sexism, desire, and Latina identity. Clap When You Land draws two sisters’ separate worlds together through grief, using alternating verse perspectives, while With the Fire on High turns to lyrical prose to portray a teenage mother balancing her gift for cooking against the practical demands of care. Across the three novels, Acevedo uses intimate narration and compressed, poetic language while keeping social pressures tangible. Her selection as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate recognizes a career spanning poetry and fiction for younger readers.
