Tournaments, Cocoa & One Wrong Move

October 1, 2010

Cassidy is a gifted basketball player, so when she lands wrong and blows out her ACL in a key game, it doesn't just foul up the season, it jeopardizes her ability to win a college scholarship, and MRIs, surgery and physical therapy don't come cheap. When her brother's fiancée, a med student, offers her a shortcut, she leaps at it. Readers will know long before Cassidy does what those "supplements" really are, but they'll bleed with her when she is suspended for steroid use and ostracized. As with the series opener, Motorcycles, Sushi & One Strange Book (2010), the real narrative arc is how Cassidy negotiates her emotional healing with the help of the mysterious RL book, a teenspeak Bible with a mind of its own that guides her to exactly the right stories to help her along the way. A bevy of sympathetic secondary teen characters keeps the predictable story enjoyable. Her hypercompetitive father, truculent brother, once-distant-now-supportive mother and saintly physical therapist stretch believability, but Cassidy's likable enough that readers will probably stick with her anyway. (Fiction. 12 & up)

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