Quarterback Season

September 1, 2011
Grades 4-7 In another absorbing sports tale from the prolific and dependable Bowen, an eighth-grade jock not only records the ups and downs of an exciting football season but he catches the writing bug. Tracking the progress of the middle-school team he quarterbacks from tryouts to the championship game in an assigned journal, Matt shares both increasingly detailed and well-described accounts of each victory or defeat and his own changing opinion of a gifted but annoyingly self-confident new team member. With practice and frequent critical feedback from his English teacher, his entries go from Paragraph 1. We had practice again today. We did a bunch of exercises and stuff to gems like The dark, the cold, the hard groundit all made me realize that winter was coming. In the end, sharing an MVP trophy with his erstwhile rival takes the sting out of losing the last game, and Matt is left mulling his next move: I like being part of a team. And I can write about winter track. The author expertly balances the subplots and football action.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)