Cochran's first novel puts a fresh angle on a familiar story: Rival high-school football teams square off for the state championship. Instead of putting readers on the field, though, Cochran takes them inside one player's head for a full day's mental preparation, rituals, flashbacks, and general ruminations. Senior Travis Cody, raised in a Louisiana town so obsessed with the sport that every boy gets a toy football at birth, looks with mixed feelings at what will most likely be his final game. He is eager to face the team that handed the Oil Camp Roughnecks its only defeat in the regular season, but all the backslapping and boosterism is beginning to wear thin, and the once-remote prospect of life after football is upon him. Rising before dawn on game day, Travis mulls over the personalities and personal influences of nearly everyone he knows, recapping the history of his dying oil town, college plans, football's pleasures, pains, and character-building aspects, and other topics. With an artfully suspenseful set of pre-game preparations, the stage is set, but the characters remain stuck in prescribed, limited roles; Travis occasionally sounds more like an adult looking back than a teenager looking ahead. Cochran primes readers for an explosive contest, then pulls out the rug by ending the story after one play—closure on an intellectual level, but not an emotional one. Despite the unevenness, this is a promising debut: thematically complex, strongly written. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-201433-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Without that frame, this would have been a fine addition to the wacked-out summer-camp subgenre.
Survival camp? How can you not have bad feelings about that?
Sixteen-year-old nerd (or geek, but not dork) Henry Lambert has no desire to go to Strongwoods Survival Camp. His father thinks it might help Henry man up and free him of some of his odd phobias. Randy, Henry’s best friend since kindergarten, is excited at the prospect of going thanks to the camp’s promotional YouTube video, so Henry relents. When they arrive at the shabby camp in the middle of nowhere and meet the possibly insane counselor (and only staff member), Max, Henry’s bad feelings multiply. Max tries to train his five campers with a combination of carrot and stick, but the boys are not athletes, let alone survivalists. When a trio of gangsters drops in on the camp Games to try to collect the debt owed by the owner, the boys suddenly have to put their skills to the test. Too bad they don’t have any—at all. Strand’s summer-camp farce is peopled with sarcastic losers who’re chatty and wry. It’s often funny, and the gags turn in unexpected directions and would do Saturday Night Live skits proud. However, the story’s flow is hampered by an unnecessary and completely unfunny frame that takes place during the premier of the movie the boys make of their experience. The repeated intrusions bring the narrative to a screeching halt.
Without that frame, this would have been a fine addition to the wacked-out summer-camp subgenre. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8455-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dare-devil mountain-climber Peak Marcello (14), decides to scale the Woolworth Building and lands in jail. To save him, his long-lost Everest-trekking dad appears with a plan for the duo to make a life in Katmandu—a smokescreen to make Peak become the youngest person in history to summit Mount Everest. Peak must learn to navigate the extreme and exotic terrain but negotiate a code of ethics among men. This and other elements such as the return of the long-lost father, bite-size chunks of information about climbing and altitude, an all-male cast, competition and suspense (can Peak be the youngest ever to summit Everest, and can he beat out a 14-year-old Nepalese boy who accompanies him?) creates the tough stuff of a “boys read.” The narrative offers enough of a bumpy ride to satisfy thrill seekers, while Peak’s softer reflective quality lends depth and some—but not too much—emotional resonance. Teachers will want to pair this with Mark Pfetzer’s Within Reach: My Everest Story (1998). (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-202417-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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