Julia Breitberg Breitberg itibaren Castrop-Rauxel, Almanya
Good book. My only negative comment is that they turned away from the Blithe family and focused more on the pastor and his children. But still a good book!
I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, requesting it because the description made me assume it would be akin to a novelization of the kind of movie that features a rag-tag group of youngsters who come together to form a winning athletic team and learn life lessons along the way, with the added bonus of checking in on them 20 years later and finding out how they turned out. However, the book is filled with many digressions about the history of Seattle, cocaine and crack, hedge funds, gentrification, the Pentecostal religion, the criminal justice system, the Seattle school system, and modern masculinity. While it's very informative to his story, and helps to round out the situations faced by himself and his teammates, these portions can seem sort of dry and irrelevant. The story shines when he relates the actual experiences of himself and his other subjects within this framework, and you can't help but wish he'd included more of these and less of the historical stuff. In each chapter, after Merlino has laid out the topic to be commented on, he includes a paragraph or two about how one or more of the guys dealt with the situation. Throughout, I found it difficult to keep track of which guys were which and how they had commented on an earlier topic, especially JT and Damien, as they were the most similar. A few more photographs would have been welcome, too. All in all, though, if you approach the book as more of a sociological study of race relations in Seattle, with an emphasis on how they affect a specific group of individuals, you can certainly see that it delivers. For a debut author, who is extremely close to his subjects, the result is largely a success.
This was one of the 2006 RUSA Notable Books winners. For the complete list, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rus...
Intriguing tale about what happens if you follow your heart.