You might bring Before the Ever After into your classroom because you want to include it as an option for your novel-in-verse book club unit. Perhaps you pick up a copy for your football-loving student athletes. Then again, you may notice that your male students need guidance on being a good friend when times are tough. Whatever your reason for teaching Before the Ever After, Jacqueline Woodson delivers.
Before the Ever After by Jacqueline Woodson
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Age Range: 11-15
Summary: 12-year-old ZJ is a musician and best friend to Ollie, Darry, and Daniel. He’s also the son of NFL superstar “Zachariah 44” Johnson. His dad loves everything about football and has excelled as a pro athlete, a husband, and a father. But he has also suffered numerous concussions. Soon, his headaches become achingly frequent, his hands shake, and his memory falters. ZJ fears he’s losing his dad and tries to understand how the sport his dad loved most is also the thing slowly taking him away.
Teaching with Before the Ever After
Recommend this book to students who:
- Play contact sports. We don’t want to scare students away from sports, but we do want to teach them how to take care of their bodies. Read this book in middle school and then direct students to Dinged by Tommy Greenwald in high school. It also discusses the long-term health impacts of contact sports.
- Love Booked and The Crossover by Kwame Alexander. Like these titles, Before the Ever After is a novel-in-verse that beautifully portrays the way athletics can be woven into our relationships.
Students will have a LOT to say about this book. Teach them to eloquently express and justify their ideas with our Socratic Seminar Preparation Graphic Organizer. Once they capture their thinking work, they'll be ready for their best discussion ever.
Read it for these themes:
Being a hero: I’ll leave this passage here:
Zachariah 44! Zachariah 44!
Is your daddy your hero? the newscaster had asked me.
And all these years later, just like that day, I know
he’s not my hero,
he’s my dad, which means
he’s my every single thing (Woodson, 4).
Friendship between boys: ZJ and his friends take care of one another. If you track the specific ways they nurture their friendships and each other, there would be so much to analyze.
Living in liminal spaces: ZJ’s dad is alive, but not fully there. He has good days and bad days. Through ZJ and his mom, this novel explores the grief and hope that characterize slowly losing someone without knowing what the future holds.
My two cents: What I haven’t mentioned yet is this novel’s gentle critique of how being a NFL player can lift you and your family out of poverty to fame and fortune — but at a potentially tremendous cost. It’s asking our students to expect more from hugely popular (and wealthy) communities like the NFL.
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