Josh earns the nickname “Filthy McNasty” in honor of his dad’s favorite jazz song. Crystal keeps a close eye on her husband, Chuck, as well, watching what he eats and calming his nerves when they attend their sons’ basketball games. The brothers are closely monitored by their mother, Crystal, both at home and at school as she is their school’s assistant principal. One of the only ways people can tell them apart is that Josh has dreadlocks and Jordan has no hair at all: “On the way to the game / I’m banished to the back / seat with JB, / who only stops / playing with my locks / when I slap him / across his bald head / with my jockstrap” (13). At six feet tall and with the guidance of their legendary basketball player father, Charles (Chuck) “Da Man” Bell, Josh and Jordan are the stars of their basketball team. 12-year-old African American Josh Bell narrates The Crossover in verse his stories and rhymes dribble down the page in much the same way he and his twin brother, Jordan, dribble the ball down the basketball court. Rebound, a prequel to The Crossover, was published in 2018. The Crossover, by award-winning children’s book author and poet Kwame Alexander, was published in 2014 and won the 2015 Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award Honor for children’s literature.
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