Undercover (edition 2009)

I was certain that this book wasn't going to work for me- it began with more than one cliché and I mentally rolled my eyes. I don't know when I started noticing Kephart's extraordinary facility with language, maybe by the second chapter. The words in this book are muscular, flexible and entirely beguiling. The main character is a nascent poet who is gradually coaxed into herself with the assistance of a phenomenal teacher and a pond.

Read it for the glorious use of language, if nothing else. ( )

A poetically-written novel about a poetically-inclined girl, Elisa. The poetry, in both Elisa's narration and her poems-as-such, is gorgeous but steers shy of either language or themes beyond the reach of a teenager, even a precocious one. In a way, "beyond the reach" and "steering shy" are what the book's about. It deals with a certain kind of somewhat old-school introspective nature poetry which is far from representative of what people write these days, but is probably still central in interesting kids, particularly girls, in poetry. The book refers to Elizabeth Bishop and Dylan Thomas, and at its culmination—as its culmination, in fact—quotes Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" in full. It fits exactly. ( )

How lovely it is to read a book for teens that dare escape the tiring plot about handsom, god like strangers and supposedly troubled, adolescent girls as deep as the snow in Sahara. How nice it is to read a book for teens with beautiful language and references to poetry.

In this book we meet Elisa, a young girl, who is misunderstood at home, and not really popular at school. She keeps to herself most of the time and her older sistee will not even acknowledge her at school. But Elisa has a secret, a secret she shares with almost every boy in school. Or every boy in love that is. She is a ghost writer. She write love notes for boys who wants to impress a girl. The girls are never told who the real poet is, and so Elisa can keep up the charade. But then Elisa falls in love with Theo, a boy she just wrote a love note for, a boy who is in love with someone else.

I really liked this book. It is gentle, moving and in a way, tender. Elisa is a very likeable character, and in many ways she reminds me of Paloma in [The Elegance of the Hedgehog], one of my favourite reads this year. Paloma has her profound thoughts and observation of movements, Elisa is preoccupied with explaining the changes in the nature surrounding her to her absent father.

Dear Dad, I can’t keep track of the changes alone, I can’t do this without you. Dear Dad, it snows, then the snow is gone, then it snows again harder, and I can’t find where I was going to inside all the weather. Dear Dad, Is this what it takes to be so good at poems, that you hurt all the time and you don’t have real friends and you have no one to talk to, so you write?

I needed the scorch of the moon and the cold on my face. I needed the stream beneath the moon and the sky full of stars. I needed ravens if there were still ravens clumped up in those trees, and if there were an owl hiding out somewhere, just one white owl, I’d climb his back and I would say, Please. Fly me anywhere.

Here’s another change I’ve noticed: The dark is more than the sun dropping off, more than the moon and the stars. It’s what you can’t see that you hope you will see, what hasn’t been that might be.

I would heartily recommend this book to any of you. Just looking at the quotes, made me want to read it again. ( )

Cyrano de bergerac, high school girl writes love notes for classmates, remains "undercover" - great use of words, poetry.

Elisa, a adolescent Cyrano de Bergerac, uses her love of words, nature and skating to navigate not only school and peer pressure, but also her family’s problems. As a spy in Undercover by Beth Kephart, Elisa creates lines of verse to help her fellow male students make their girlfriends and soon-to-be girlfriends swoon. She does so with stealth and folded scraps of paper without much thought, until Theo comes along.

“Dad likes to say, about both of us, that we’re undercover operatives who see the world better than the world sees us, and this, I swear, has its benefits.” (page 8 )

Elisa takes much of her dad’s advice to heart, and much of that is probably because he’s away on business a lot of the time. She spends quite a lot of time observing and creating verse until in Honors English she comes upon the tragedy of Cyrano, which effectively turns her philosophy upside down. Beyond spending her days writing poems, she’s discovered a pond to provide her inspiration. When it freezes over, she decides to skate . . . something she has never done before.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2010/08/undercover-by-beth-kephart.html> ( )