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Lamar Giles, author of Ruin Road, takes the idea of selling one’s soul to the devil to a whole new level. His novel further reinforces the moral: Be careful what you wish for, and even suggests that sometimes fear can be a good thing. Playing wide receiver, Kincade (Cade) Webster attends Neeson Preparatory School on an athletic scholarship and dreams of playing football for Ohio State. When he makes it into the pros, he plans to take his best friends out of Jacob’s Court with him: Gabby and Booker Payne. One night, while escaping an altercation on the bus, Cade walks into Skinner’s Pawn andRead More →

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In her novel Kareem Between, Shifa Saltagi Safadi shares a story about the experiences of seventh grader Kareem, who loves football and dreams of being the first Syrian American NFL player. Seeing his name on an American jersey would spell perfection for him, but first he has to earn a position on the middle school team. Set in Indiana from 2016-2017, Kareem feels invisible since he doesn’t make the football roster and his best friend Adam has moved away. To find comfort, Kareem escapes to the library where the smell of paper and ink and books surrounds him. A lover of words, Kareem uses NFLRead More →

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Readers of Kim Johnson and Angie Thomas will likely enjoy Kneel by Candace Buford. Set in Monroe, Louisiana, Kneel follows the story of the Jackson Jaguars high school football team and their two star players: Marion LaSalle and Russell Boudreaux. Football is the two athletes’ ticket out of Monroe and out of poverty. Marion is possibly the best quarterback in Louisiana, and Russell is a regionally ranked tight end. For both, their bodies are their greatest assets. Although Russell is no slouch in the classroom, the field is the only place where Marion is on top. However, that is taken from him when he isRead 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 →