BUSTED

A locker room incident leaves a teen hockey player fretting over whether or not to report a teammate who has violent tendencies both on and off the ice.

Drake is a rule-breaker who has “a wild streak” when he’s playing—but he’s also the team’s highest scorer. That leaves Jonah understandably conflicted after he sees Drake leave their goalie, Carter, injured on the floor with a bruised rib in the wake of some supposedly friendly roughhousing. Worse yet, Jonah has caught the whole thing on his phone, so he worries about his own fate if the video gets out and leads to Drake’s being thrown off the team—and taking out his anger on Jonah. Mills’ novel, which is written and designed with striving and dyslexic teen readers in mind, weaves in complex themes, including Jonah’s need to juggle team loyalties with the possible consequences (to others as well as himself) if he remains silent about the issue of ice hockey’s culture of violence, which is abetted by the complicity of coaches and adults. Drake also emerges as a well-rounded character: His arc includes a startling confession about the pressures he feels to conform to certain expectations, and he faces high stakes and hard choices about his behavior. The characters aren’t physically described and are racially ambiguous.

Thought-provoking, engaging, and highly accessible.