Keesha's House gives a very interesting perspective into some issues that young people face. I think that it works to give adult readers an insight into the thoughts and emotions of young people that might otherwise be overlooked as hoodlums. At the same time, when it switches to the adult's perspectives, it gives young readers a look at adults and their feelings about kids. These aspects allow the two sides to perhaps hear something that they wouldn't say or hear in other circumstances.
I think casting the home owner Joe as a male character is also interesting. A man letting a bunch of teenage girls live in his home could certainly be interpreted less than innocently. But Joe is completely noble in his desire to help these kids and he stands in stark contrast to most of the other adult male characters in the story. There is Keesha's drunk of a father, Harris' homophobic bigot father, and one of the other father's, whose name I can't remember right now, is in jail. So, getting a positive male role model in the form of Joe becomes a very powerful tool in this story. Especially since males are not generally the more nourishing sex. I suppose that what Joe does isn't necessarily nourishing, it could be seen more as protection and providing, which would be his sex's socially excepted role. Hmmmm.
Keesha, on the other hand, functions as the opposite of most the adult female characters who are weak, with the exception perhaps, of Laura (Stephie's mother). Keesha decides that she will be strong and find a way to survive. She finds Joe's house and declares that she won't let anyone else decide what happens with her body. Meanwhile, the adult female characters allow their husbands to abuse their children or stand by while their husband disowns a child because he is gay. Again, as in the other books discussed here, the parents in this story are terrible adult and parental role models.
The way the characters all connect by the end is made interesting by the poetic style that Frost utilizes. The characters start using the last line of the previous poem to begin their poem. This, obviously, illustrates how the issues that each one of the characters are facing connects them. Knowing that other people are going through similar things can give them some comfort and even help them realize that there are ways for things to get better. Besides this aspect however, the poetic form of the story didn't add much for me. Hearing the individual voices added to the characterization but the story didn't need poetry to do that necessarily.
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Myself, I'm ambivalent about the novel's use of poetic form. I like Frost's attention to form, that is, I like the fact that she writes sestinas and sonnets, rather than simply writing the sort of shapeless free verse that one so often sees in verse-novels like these. But, OTOH, I miss the kind of dynamic interaction between characters that one tends to get in more conventional narrative. I miss conversation. I miss dialogue. I miss the back-and-forth between characters.
So much of the book happens in retrospect, that is, so much is narrated or summed up by the characters after the fact. The approach seems summative rather than dramatic. As a result, I think there's a loss of immediacy. The book's twists and turns therefore didn't really seem like twists and turns to me.
I think I actually prefer Frost's other verse-novel, Spinning Through the Universe, which is about a classroom of fifth-graders. It seems richer and more diverse to me, at least in terms of form, and for some reason its incidents and images stay much more vividly in my mind.
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