OUT OF ORDER

Colt Trammel swaggers through his sophomore year shoving a huge rebellious streak in his teachers’ faces. His cockiness manifests Colt’s way of coping with his own weaknesses as a person. Colt knows he’s good-looking, a terrific baseball player, a member of the “in” crowd, but mostly, he’s sure he’s stupid. Actually Colt possesses more basic humanity than many of the older students he admires, but he makes some poor choices before realizing that he has some worth outside of baseball. Written in often profane but believable first-person, Colt defies his teachers as he fails in school, romance, and in his relationships with his friends. Only when he begins to accept two girls he has previously rejected does he begin to realize some of his potential. Jenkins’s insight into Colt’s adolescent thinking and into the common problems with which he copes will appeal to many young readers. (Fiction. YA)