A youth librarian from Clarks Summit recommended this to me, saying she wanted to adopt all the boys and take them home. I did like it very much, but it verges on what’s become excellent-YA-novel formula: a narrator wise beyond his years and wonderful in every way except for a temper (he’s smart, handsome, and a natural athlete too! plus he has the absolute perfect girlfriend!); nastier than nasty villains; a motley team that comes together and helps each one feel better about himself. Reads very much like Jerry Spinelli, Joan Bauer, or Bruce Brooks. T.J. (The Tao—his given name) Jones is mixed-race in a racist town, and a battered wife & abused child are a subplot; I can’t say these issues aren’t handled well, but there’s just something that rings a little false. Maybe it’s that TJ, despite his desire to beat up the thugs, ultimately is remarkably saintly (let alone his adoptive dad, who dies a Christ-like death at the end). Maybe it’s the (black) counselor’s name being “Georgia Brown” and actually referred to as “Sweet Georgia Brown.” (The copy I read is advanced uncorrected proofs, so maybe an editor convinced Crutcher to change it). Maybe it’s the father figure who ends up coaching TJ’s rag-tag swim team—he lives illegally in the gym so he can send his son to college, works double shifts at fast food joints, yet is perfectly happy to get by on 4 hours sleep a night so he can coach in the early AM and drive them to all the swim meets (hours in each direction). But these are relatively minor gripes—it was a compelling read and I rooted for all the boys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A youth librarian from Clarks Summit recommended this to me, saying she wanted to adopt all the boys and take them home. I did like it very much, but it verges on what’s become excellent-YA-novel formula: a narrator wise beyond his years and wonderful in every way except for a temper (he’s smart, handsome, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1093,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions\/1093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}