Lone Stars

July 15, 2017
A San Antonio middle school football player grapples with his changing relationship with football in the face of fear and the consequences of concussion. After a nasty hit, white wide receiver Clay Hollis starts to hold back, missing catches out of fear of getting hit. It's embarrassing, and he doesn't want to let down his best friend and quarterback, David Guerrero, or his white coach, who played with the 1990s-era Cowboys. The hit has him thinking about his mother's research into concussions--she's a football fanatic too, but she doesn't want her son's brain injured. Coach Coop himself took so many hits that he can be forgetful--and the episodes are happening more frequently. Clay teams up with team-manager Maddie, David's football-guru younger sister, to get Coach Coop an iPhone, set up both reminders and the Waze app for when he gets lost, and help cover up his decline so he can have one last championship run with his team before being honored during the Thanksgiving Day Cowboys game. Racial descriptors show up mostly in naming conventions (David and his family are probably Latinx); Alamo hero-worship strikes a bit of an off note. While Clay's fears seem sometimes to be handled too easily and the coach's storyline grows repetitive, the play descriptions are top-notch, and the ending's a poignant surprise. Uneven plotting elevated by football nuance--on and off the field. (Fiction. 10-14)

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September 1, 2017
Grades 4-7 In San Antonio, football is life. For 12-year-old wide receiver Clay Hollis, don't play scared are the words that he lives byuntil, that is, he takes a big hit during one of his Pop Warner football games and thereafter finds himself dodging catches, scared of getting hurt again. His fear grows when his best friend (and team quarterback) gets a concussion on the field. Suddenly, Clay can't stop thinking about everything his mom has been saying about football and long-term brain damage. To top it all off, Clay is beginning to realize that the memory-loss episodes of Coach Coop (a former Dallas Cowboys player) are more serious that Clay might have thought. Can Clay work through his fears in time to help his team get to the championships and to help Coach Coop get to his Cowboys reunion during Thanksgiving weekend? Despite the rushed and somewhat contrived ending, Lupica's football nuance is unparalleled. Young readers, no matter their level of interest in the game, will be drawn in by this touching, timely story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2018
A hard hit makes twelve-year-old wide receiver Clay Hollis fearful of concussions, and it affects his performance. But Clay's also worried about his coach/mentor, a former Dallas Cowboy who exhibits increasingly odd behavior and memory loss. The fast-paced football action is engaging, but this story's heart is its timely focus on concussive injuries and the moving relationship between Coach Cooper and his players.

(Copyright 2018 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)