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Sports/Real/Soccer/4-8
Ari Fish, 12, believes in luck. Like many athletes, he has pregame rituals: reading the newspaper, checking his horoscope, and eating a particular cereal. On the day he discovers the long-sought-after soccer trading card of his hero, his luck skyrockets: he finally makes first-string goalie. But as Ari's luck increases, his friend Mac's decreases. By far the best player on the team, Mac is not having a good year and hates not being the center of attention. When Ari's card disappears, the newest team member, the first and only girl to play in the boys' league, tells Ari that Mac was the last person near his backpack. Ari must decide which is more valuable, his friendship and the status quo, or supporting and trusting someone telling the truth. Aronson does an excellent job of capturing middle-school voices. Beyond Lucky offers an interesting tale of friendship and competition that moves at a good pace, carefully interweaving the stories of the protagonist's personal and athletic growth. The soccer action will make the story extra appealing to seasoned players, but does not exclude those who are unfamiliar with the sport. While targeted toward a younger audience and not filled with as many social overtones as Chris Crutcher's Whale Talk (HarperCollins, 2001), Aronson's book provides better-than-average character development for a sports novel.-Devin Burritt, Jackson Memorial Library, Tenants Harbor, ME (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Ghost by Jason Reynolds (Patina #2, Sunny #3)

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Ghost by Jason Reynolds (Patina #2, Sunny #3)

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Realistic Fic/5-8
Booklist starred (2016 (Vol. 113, No. 1))
Castle “Ghost” Cranshaw has been running for three years, ever since the night his father shot a gun at him and his mother. When he gets recruited by a local track coach for a championship team, they strike a deal: if Ghost can stop getting into fights at school, he can run for the Defenders, but one altercation and he’s gone. Despite Ghost’s best intentions, everyone always has something to say about his raggedy shoes, homemade haircut, ratty clothes, or his neighborhood, and he doesn’t last 24 hours without a brawl. Will Coach and his mom give him another chance to be part of something bigger than himself, or is he simply destined to explode?

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Booklist starred (August 2017 (Vol. 113, No. 22))

Grades 5-8. When Patina “Patty” Jones, the fastest girl on the Defenders track team, comes in second place in a race—a fact she finds unacceptable—her rage is so intense that she mentally checks out. In an effort to make her into a team player, Coach assigns her to the 4x800 relay race and makes the relay team do hokey things like waltz in practice to “learn each others’ rhythms.” Pfft. Meanwhile, Patty feels completely out of place at her rich-girl academy. And then there’s the really hard stuff. Like how her father died, how her mother “got the sugar” (diabetes) and it took her legs, and now Patty and her little sister live with their aunt Emily and uncle Tony. Reynolds’ again displays his knack for capturing authentic voice in both Patty’s inner monologues and the spoken dialogue. The plot races as fast as the track runners in it, and—without ever feeling like a book about “issues”—it deftly tackles topics like isolation, diverse family makeup, living with illness, losing a parent, transcending socioeconomic and racial barriers, and—perhaps best of all—what it’s like for a tween to love their little sister more than all the cupcakes in the world. The second entry in the four-book Track series, this serves as a complete, complex, and sparkling stand-alone novel.

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Now is the time for running by Michael Williams

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Now is the time for running by Michael Williams

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Real Fic/7-12.
Deo, 14, is playing soccer with his friends in his Zimbabwe village when soldiers arrive, destroy everything, and kill his mother. Running for his life while caring for his older, mentally disabled brother, Innocent, Deo takes his homemade soccer ball with him as they flee across the border to South Africa. Told in the young teen’s first-person, present-tense narrative, the survival adventure follows the brothers as they crawl beneath barbed wire, wade through the Limpopo River, run barefoot near dangerous wild animals, and find work picking tomatoes for a white farmer before seeking shelter in the rough townships outside Johannesburg and Cape Town, where they face grim xenophobia. Based on his interviews with Zimbabwean refugee boys on the Cape Town streets, Williams captures the refugees’ anguish, and Deo’s realistic relationship with his brother is heartbreaking. Along with the sorrow, though, is the detailed sports action, as Deo escapes through soccer, and the exciting game specifics climax when Deo kicks the winning goal in the 2010 Street Soccer World Cup final.Booklist (September 15, 2011 (Vol. 108, No. 2))

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Real Fic/Verse/Sports/6-12. The Bell twins are stars on the basketball court and comrades in life. While there are some differences—Josh shaves his head and Jordan loves his locks—both twins adhere to the Bell basketball rules: In this game of life, your family is the court, and the ball is your heart. With a former professional basketball player dad and an assistant principal mom, there is an intensely strong home front supporting sports and education in equal measures. When life intervenes in the form of a hot new girl, the balance shifts and growing apart proves painful. An accomplished author and poet, Alexander eloquently mashes up concrete poetry, hip-hop, a love of jazz, and a thriving family bond. The effect is poetry in motion. It is a rare verse novel that is fundamentally poetic rather than using this writing trend as a device. There is also a quirky vocabulary element that adds a fun intellectual note to the narrative. This may be just the right book for those hard-to-match youth who live for sports or music or both.Booklist (March 15, 2014 (Vol. 110, No. 14))