Out of the Tunnel

August 4, 2014
With the kickoff of the Red Zone series, focused on the beloved high school football team in tiny Troy, Ohio, and written at a fourth-grade level, Jones shows that the cult of blind jock worship is still alive and well, but it’s also being challenged by independent-minded student athletes. Even though Brian is a varsity starter, he can’t escape the shadow of his overbearing football legend father, who was part of the school’s championship team years ago. He hesitantly takes part in some ugly, destructive traditions of the Big Six (the inner circle of players) and damages friendships before deciding that self-respect and his love of the game are what’s most important. A vibrant mix of personalities and circumstances among the team members and staff—including the pompous, Vince Lombardi–quoting Coach Z—sets the stage for additional tales of the Trojans’ pivotal season. Simultaneously available: Breakthrough, The Option, and At All Costs. Ages 11–18.

September 1, 2014

Gr 7 Up-This hi-lo series focuses on the drama surrounding a high school football team in Troy, Ohio. In Out of the Tunnel, Brian breaks into the team's inner circle, starting as tight end and joining an elite group founded years earlier by his father. Brian plays a central role in updating a tradition, luring a vulnerable female friend to a party where she's coaxed to become drunk and strip for the boys while they snap pictures with their phones. In the end, Brian leaves the group in disgust but remains on the team and disappointingly never really comes clean. In Breakthrough, giant Efram moves from Arizona and is recruited to play for the Trojans, cheered on by his mohawk-wearing, computer-geek friend, Flick. The Option has Gary filming star quarterback Shane driving drunk in order to blackmail him and take his starting position. At All Costs is the most probing, addressing concussions and the way they can be ignored by coaches eager for victory. Curiously, football is presented throughout as a toxic and corrosive culture. Players are dishonest and cruel to one another, coaches are sadistic and unreliable, and boys perceived as weak are dismissed as "ladies." The sometimes dense game descriptions will appeal to football fans. While the stories overlap somewhat, the entries can be read independently. Frequent references to underage drinking and occasional mature (though not explicit) sexual situations make this series a solidly high school selection.-Bob Hassett, Luther Jackson Middle School, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2014
An uneasy story of entitlement gone wrong, first in a series about the players on an Ohio high school football team.Though the sport of football is taking some serious lumps today, there are still those who think the players possess a special mojo. As tight end, one of the elite, Brian Norwood is falling into that trap, and he is part of the hazing rituals the seniors wreak on the juniors, pranks that can turn into crimes. Jones writes with an unvarnished sense of being there and with a taste of the rightly judgmental. The white knight is Dylan, another potential member of the inner circle, who finds the rituals not just distasteful, but shameful, but Brian falls short. Peer pressure has sunk better men, but in the end, Brian doesn't own his abominable behavior. If Jones had wanted this to be cinema verite, where the path is never straight and the mood is existential, then the story had to be much more subtle and the skies lower. As it is, Brian loses readers' sympathy, and the point of the story is too grim for its essential cluelessness. Publishing simultaneously in the Red Zone series are Breakthrough, by A.L. Priest; The Option, by Herman Brown; and At All Costs, by Jones and Brent Chartier.Pungent but also sour. (Fiction. 11-18)

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September 1, 2014
Grades 6-9 Brian Norwood looks forward to being a star on the Trojan high-school football team, just like his father was. But once he is in the team's inner circle, he learns that there's more involved than just playing. An initiation rite, which in his dad's day was called the Tunnel of Love, now involves getting a drunk girl to strip and then sending a photo of her around school. Brian doesn't think that he is the kind of guy who would do thisbut it turns out that he is. This first book in the new high/low Red Zone series seems to tell a lot rather than show it. For instance, the scene with the girl is completely offstage. Perhaps these omissions keep the book shorter, but it does feel as if text is missing. On the plus side, readers will identify with Brian, who just wants to play football and is in over his head as he tries to keep up with the team hotshots and maintain a sense of self. They will like the football, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)