Strong like you

Gr 7 Up--Football is practically the only thing 15-year-old Walker Lauderdale cares about. But he has more than his share of distractions. His dad, Hank, who has always been a hustler living at the edge of the law, has been missing for a month. Gone with him is Uncle Rufus, a fellow traveler and father to Sawyer, Walker's cousin, neighbor, and closest friend. There's a new football coach, bent not only on improving the team's fortunes but on making successful adults out of his players, along with taking a particular interest in Walker--and his mom. Increasingly obsessed with finding out what happened to his dad, Walker takes enormous risks confronting Lukas, a sometime partner of Hank and Rufus who seems to be desperately hiding what he knows about their fate. The novel is framed in the second person, as Walker's plea to Hank, an occasionally awkward construction. Coach Widner is Black, while all other characters are cued as white. Walker has a Homecoming fling with a friend of Sawyer's date and pursues a fumbling romance with new girl Chloe from New York, but female characters are peripheral and not well developed. A serious look at the legacy and impact of violence, especially around the toxic culture of football, along with a compassionate view of the struggle and frequent hopelessness of rural poverty, the novel makes for a compelling read with a mixed but ultimately hopeful conclusion. VERDICT Recommended for libraries serving middle and high schoolers.--Bob Hassett

Poverty and father worship lead an Arkansas teenager into dangerous choices and situations. Ignoring plenty of signs that his missing father was not the best role model, Walker struggles to emulate his dad's facade of toughness, both on and off the high school football field that he and Sawyer, his tight buddy and cousin, brutally patrol. Even as the prospect of being turned out of their house looms, and his new coach spends more and more time with Walker's abandoned, penniless mom, the sophomore resolves to track his errant father down and fetch him back to set things right. But the trail quickly leads through an ugly tangle of drugs, drinking, and criminal acts to a shocking revelation, followed by gun violence. Walker's emotional instability, the small-town setting's poverty, and the descriptions of families in crisis all lend the tale a harsh cast overall. But at the urging of a patient school guidance counselor, Walker discovers the power of poetry to articulate his feelings and also finds in his coach a steadier father figure. The book explores masculinity, with Walker having a heartening insight near the end, when he realizes that with the right help, people can learn better than they were taught. (The lucky ones, anyway.) The coach draws comment for being Black; other major characters seem to be white. A grim but not entirely hopeless picture of life in the Ozarks, threaded with tragedies both immediate and endemic. (reading guide) (Fiction. 13-17) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.