Reactions to a novel written in verse (late because I got food poisoning last week and totally forgot!)

Reading a novel like Make Lemonade was interesting because I had never read a novel like that before, and had only enjoyed poetry in very different ways-- getting it in smaller doses for a class or just for fun. When I first heard it was going to be all in verse, I was nervous about the possibility of reading a bunch of rhyming, cheesy poems strung together to make a novel. I was pleasantly surprised to find this wasn't the case... Not that I thought we would read something bad, just that thinking about a YA novel written in verse makes me immediately think like that. I was a little suspicious. I think I have mostly been exposed to either classical poetry (I'm a French major, so a lot of 19th century sonnets come to mind) or really contemporary or more abstract poetry and verse. Make Lemonade is really great because it is just a bunch of free verse poems connecting together to make a whole story. Wolff didn't make it seem too contrived, which was a good thing. Her style seemed really innovative to me because I have never seen anything like that done. I loved it. It was not what I was expecting at all, and was very different from what I was used to. Having LaVaughn be the speaker of the novel also made all the poems have a really interesting feeling. I thought it was wonderful.