Persistence in the face of defeat and disappointment defines a season of sports and adolescent life.
Ice hockey provides an outlet for young boys in a tough town, but the season comes with its own challenges.
The Strikers are a youth ice hockey team in 1980s Flint, Michigan, a club of misfits in a low-stakes league. Evan’s slightly skeptical about signing on with this crew and tempers his hopes for a successful season. He’s not wrong to doubt—the star player (also the coach’s son) wrecks his ACL in game one, leaving the team without a coach or captain. The season stays bumpy, with frustrating losses, a knock-down fight, and a few moments of glory. Disappointments abound off the ice as well. Evan’s mom’s boyfriend is unemployed and unreliable when Evan needs coaching support, and though Evan’s dad wants to coach, he has to leave town to work for extended periods. Other teammates face their own challenges, with their backgrounds detailed in trading card–style bios at the start of this graphic novel, but the central story is squarely Evan’s. Angular illustrations express emotional interactions effectively but feel a bit stiff for conveying dynamic game play. Ultimately, however, the sense that sports can tenuously hold things together for the kids, their parents, and their struggling city is poignant and palpable. Although most of the athletes present white, the lineup includes Black twin brothers who are multisport athletes keeping busy in their off-seasons.
Persistence in the face of defeat and disappointment defines a season of sports and adolescent life. (Graphic fiction. 8-14)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9798765607466
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Graphic Universe
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read.
Will a bully always be a bully?
That’s the question eighth-grade football captain Chase Ambrose has to answer for himself after a fall from his roof leaves him with no memory of who and what he was. When he returns to Hiawassee Middle School, everything and everyone is new. The football players can hardly wait for him to come back to lead the team. Two, Bear Bratsky and Aaron Hakimian, seem to be special friends, but he’s not sure what they share. Other classmates seem fearful; he doesn’t know why. Temporarily barred from football because of his concussion, he finds a new home in the video club and, over time, develops a new reputation. He shoots videos with former bullying target Brendan Espinoza and even with Shoshanna Weber, who’d hated him passionately for persecuting her twin brother, Joel. Chase voluntarily continues visiting the nursing home where he’d been ordered to do community service before his fall, making a special friend of a decorated Korean War veteran. As his memories slowly return and he begins to piece together his former life, he’s appalled. His crimes were worse than bullying. Will he become that kind of person again? Set in the present day and told in the alternating voices of Chase and several classmates, this finding-your-middle-school-identity story explores provocative territory. Aside from naming conventions, the book subscribes to the white default.
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read. (Fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-338-05377-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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