Believable pain and recovery against a solid football backdrop.
A middle school football player grieves his father’s death both on and off the field.
Tommy Gallagher, defensive star “monster back” (a flexible position that can shift between safety and linebacker as necessary to make big plays), is having a phenomenal game when tragedy strikes: his firefighter father doesn’t make it out of a burning building in time. Tommy has a strong support system but struggles to see that he’s bottling up his emotions and then releasing them in unhealthy ways playing. Once he understands this, however, he then starts erring the other way, playing football with too much hesitancy and not enough joy. His path to overcoming grief is not linear, punctuated instead with believable backslides. Meanwhile, his soccer-star younger sister deals in a different way, shutting down completely and even leaving her sport. Uniting, they see reflections of their father in each other. Serviceable writing sometimes veers into cheesy or repetitive territory but is strongest in its depiction of Tommy’s emotional tunnel-vision and—of course—in the football itself, where the analytic intellect and pattern recognition required for reading offenses proves quarterbacks aren’t the only brains on the field. Aside from white, Irish-American Tommy, racial markers are mostly absent, and the characters mostly come from Boston’s largely white Brighton neighborhood (fans of other teams should be warned that Patriots references abound).
Believable pain and recovery against a solid football backdrop. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17279-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
An endearing protagonist runs the first, fast leg of Reynolds' promising relay.
Castle “Ghost” Cranshaw feels like he’s been running ever since his dad pulled that gun on him and his mom—and used it.
His dad’s been in jail three years now, but Ghost still feels the trauma, which is probably at the root of the many “altercations” he gets into at middle school. When he inserts himself into a practice for a local elite track team, the Defenders, he’s fast enough that the hard-as-nails coach decides to put him on the team. Ghost is surprised to find himself caring enough about being on the team that he curbs his behavior to avoid “altercations.” But Ma doesn’t have money to spare on things like fancy running shoes, so Ghost shoplifts a pair that make his feet feel impossibly light—and his conscience correspondingly heavy. Ghost’s narration is candid and colloquial, reminiscent of such original voices as Bud Caldwell and Joey Pigza; his level of self-understanding is both believably childlike and disarming in its perception. He is self-focused enough that secondary characters initially feel one-dimensional, Coach in particular, but as he gets to know them better, so do readers, in a way that unfolds naturally and pleasingly. His three fellow “newbies” on the Defenders await their turns to star in subsequent series outings. Characters are black by default; those few white people in Ghost’s world are described as such.
An endearing protagonist runs the first, fast leg of Reynolds' promising relay. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5015-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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