A wish-fulfillment fantasy pleasingly complicated by real emotional journeys.
An undersized middle school football player inherits an NFL team.
When his father—whom Ryan’s never met and whose name he doesn’t even know—dies, he leaves Ryan the Dallas Cowboys. A confusing series of flashbacks and exposition about Ryan’s relationship with football sets the story up, including his mother’s initial refusal to let him play and the odd position he occupied on the team as a player so small that his coaches purposefully prevented him from experiencing the contact side of the sport. This rough beginning gives way to a character-driven story. Ryan battles urges to exploit his new status, with the help of a mother determined to teach him to be a good person and two wonderful best friends (a friendly giant of a teammate and a pretty, fantasy-football whiz) who like Ryan for himself, not because he’s the newly famous kid owner. But bullies on his team still target Ryan, and Ryan’s wicked stepmother schemes to snatch the Cowboys for her own son—the star player of the rival middle school’s team. When Ryan isn’t dealing with power plays from lawyers or the Cowboys’ feuding general manager and coach, he’s trying to earn a shot at quarterback; despite his not-spectacular arm, Ryan’s ability to read defense makes him a natural for a spread offense. All storylines culminate in a big game, and it’s a good one.
A wish-fulfillment fantasy pleasingly complicated by real emotional journeys. (Fiction. 8-14)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229379-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Laugh-out-loud fun with a wonderful cast of characters. A winner in every way.
Tank is a 2,580-pound rhinoceros living in the city zoo.
Unfortunately, his domicile is just on the other side of the right-field fence at the park where 12-year-old Nick Spirakis and his friends play their own variation of baseball. When Nick misses a ball that his nemesis, Pete, drives into Tank’s territory, Nick jumps in, grabs the ball, and makes it out just in time to avoid Tank’s charge. Nick narrates the tale, set in 1948 in a Midwestern city patterned after Milwaukee, describing his friends and activities as if he is in direct conversation with readers. Every Saturday is spent working in his father’s shop, wishing he could be playing ball instead. His father, a Greek immigrant, prizes hard work and ambition and is determined that Nick will own the shop someday. Everything changes when the new owner of the city’s minor league baseball team shakes everything up. There are promotions to lure everyone into the ballpark. Nick and his pals join a batboy-for-a-day contest that takes place on Saturdays, causing him to invent some rather convoluted lies to explain his absences from the shop. Themes (rivalries, family dynamics, feminism) and historical details (radio announcers, frozen custard) combine with lots of mishaps and misadventures, including another very public encounter with Tank. The story assumes a white default.
Laugh-out-loud fun with a wonderful cast of characters. A winner in every way. (acknowledgments, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5344-0626-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Twelve-year-old Derek—a notoriously reluctant reader of everything but Calvin and Hobbes—would rather set the grass on fire with his sister’s old sunlamp than tackle his summer reading list. More than that, though, he wants to figure out why his mom’s acting so weird about the ten-year-old article he found from a Martha’s Vineyard newspaper entitled “LOCAL GIRL FOUND DEAD ON BEACH.” That mystery threads throughout this engaging middle-grade novel, told in a dryly hilarious first-person voice. Words like “impulse” and “discipline” are illustrated Pictionary-style by the author’s teenage son, mirroring Derek’s vocabulary-building technique: “My parents insist I use this system all the time, so I usually pretend I’m a spy being tortured by Super Evildoers who force me to practice ‘active reading’ or be killed by a foreign assassin.” When he’s not making avocado grenades, the smart-alecky Derek reveals himself as an endearing softy who loves his friends, family and dog and is even capable, in time, of befriending—horrors!—the class goody-goody. A kinder, gentler Wimpy Kid with all the fun and more plot. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8903-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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