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Carr “The Raptor” Luka lives in deep orbit on the far side of the moon on an inner ring of Valtego Station.  Although he’s from Earth, he has come to Valtego Station to train in the sport of zeroboxing.  Using a combination of boxing, martial arts, and wrestling moves, a zeroboxer fights inside a Cube in zero gravity conditions.  Similar to the mixed martial arts of cage fighting, zeroboxing receives some of the same criticism and is surrounded by similar controversy as that we see in contemporary times.  But that controversy is not central to Fonda Lee’s debut science fiction, sports novel, Zeroboxer.  Instead, theRead More →

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John Feinstein puts you in the heart of the game.  Doesn’t matter if it’s the baseball field, the basketball court, or the football field, when you open up the pages of one of his books, you are in the center of the action with the thrill, the agony, and the controlled chaos of sport whirling around you.  Years of sports experience, finely honed descriptive skills, and a gift for storytelling combine to make Feinstein’s young adult novels captivating, action-oriented, and worth reading whenever you can get your hands on one. In The Walk On, out this Fall from Knopf, we meet freshman Alex Myers. His folksRead More →

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A good story takes you places. And with Taking Flight, a memoir by Michaela and Elaine DePrince, the reader journeys from war-torn Sierra Leone in West Africa to recital halls in New York City with Mabinty Bangura. With this memoir, readers learn something of West African culture. In a typical household in the Kenema District of southeastern Sierra Leone, marriages are arranged, polygamy is acceptable, domestic violence is permissible, women learn how to cook, clean, sew, and care for children, and a girl child is not a cause for celebration—especially not a girl child born with the skin condition vitiligo that causes a mottled pigmentationRead More →

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Jake Collier is a cyclist, a fierce competitor and a smart strategist.  He’s also a bit jealous of his talented teammate Juan Carlos from Ecuador.  Caught in the middle is Tessa Taylor, the seventeen-year-old host of KidVison, a television show for young people that runs on Greater Boston Cable News (GBC N).  Although Tessa is known as the “PBS Princess” and Juan Carlos is known as the “altar boy,” Diana Renn’s book Latitude Zero proves that we are all more than a nickname. Set in both Cambridge, Massachusetts (latitude forty two), and Ecuador (latitude zero), where poinsettia trees grow wild and unpruned among the lushRead More →

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A reader who enjoyed Lauren Morrill’s debut novel, Meant to Be, or who appreciates books like Sarah Dessen’s Along for the Ride should find pleasure in Morrill’s latest book, Being Sloane Jacobs.  Despite the plot similarities, this book pushes beyond girl drama and romance, skating its way into the sports genre—with a couple of richly descriptive scenes where Sloane Emily and Sloane Devon compare gross injuries. The skating rink is Sloane Emily Jacobs’ childhood home, but when life in D.C. begins to spin out of control, the figure skating rink becomes another arena where Seej—as she is called by her brother James—feels judged and whereRead More →

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As proven time and time again, Mike Lupica has the talent to get the reader right into the action: whether it’s on the court, on the diamond, or on the fifty yard line, there’s a visceral, in-the-moment, hard-hitting feeling to all of Lupica’s sports-action sequences.  The pulse-pounding, bone-crunching, split-second action on the football field in QB 1 is yet another example of how skillfully Lupica can make a reader (even a girl who’s never touched a football) feel what it’s like to be the quarterback, in the pocket, waiting for an opening, dodging a hefty tackler, hoping to make the down and move the teamRead More →

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Maria Padian’s new novel Out of Nowhere captures the truth of the adage that the only thing constant in life is change.  Padian’s protagonist, high school senior and soccer team captain Tom Bouchard, experiences the futility of one’s efforts at controlling outcomes.  He discovers how even a simple action or choice can have far-reaching repercussions and realizes that luck can “curl up next to you one minute, then bite you the next” (275). Enniston,Maine, provides the backdrop for this novel that explores these issues, as well as the contemporary topic of cultural collisions.  Tom’s quiet hometown becomes the home to an influx of Somalian refugeesRead More →

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In Foul Trouble, veteran sports journalist and best-selling novelist, John Feinstein, takes an unflinching look at the cut-throat process of collegiate recruiting top student talent.  Feinstein pulls back the curtain to reveal a shadow world that is rarely seen by the general sports fan and it’s not a very pretty:  a subculture packed with unscrupulous people who latch onto these young athletes hoping to make millions on the kids’ talents; high stakes ultimatums and heavy amounts of pressure to go with the “highest bidder” even if its against NCAA rules and one’s own better judgment; and a dizzy array of media attention, drugs, swag, andRead More →

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If there was ever a character about whom you could say “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, it would have to be Harrison Johnson in Tim Green‘s latest, Unstoppable.  Harrison is only 13 years old, but in his short life he’s already faced abusive foster parents, beating and intimidation from his fellow foster kids, a system set up to break him down, and the realization that his own mother will never be able to care for him like  a mother should.  When he catches a break and gets away from his most abusive foster family yet and lands in the loving, peaceful home ofRead More →