Last Man Out

July 15, 2016
A middle school football player grieves his father's death both on and off the field.Tommy Gallagher, defensive star "monster back" (a flexible position that can shift between safety and linebacker as necessary to make big plays), is having a phenomenal game when tragedy strikes: his firefighter father doesn't make it out of a burning building in time. Tommy has a strong support system but struggles to see that he's bottling up his emotions and then releasing them in unhealthy ways playing. Once he understands this, however, he then starts erring the other way, playing football with too much hesitancy and not enough joy. His path to overcoming grief is not linear, punctuated instead with believable backslides. Meanwhile, his soccer-star younger sister deals in a different way, shutting down completely and even leaving her sport. Uniting, they see reflections of their father in each other. Serviceable writing sometimes veers into cheesy or repetitive territory but is strongest in its depiction of Tommy's emotional tunnel-vision and--of course--in the football itself, where the analytic intellect and pattern recognition required for reading offenses proves quarterbacks aren't the only brains on the field. Aside from white, Irish-American Tommy, racial markers are mostly absent, and the characters mostly come from Boston's largely white Brighton neighborhood (fans of other teams should be warned that Patriots references abound). Believable pain and recovery against a solid football backdrop. (Fiction. 10-14)

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September 1, 2016
Grades 5-8 Lupica stirs equal quantities of grief and gridiron action into his latest outing. Tommy Gallagher, 12-year-old star strong safety on the Brighton Bears, is devastated when his wonderful, worshiped firefighter dad dies in the course of a rescue. The tragedy occurs during the second game of a season that features one suspenseful contest after another, leaving Tommy struggling both on and off the field, while trying to be there as best he can for his mom and his withdrawn little sister. Lupica effectively puts readers into the center of the action, both during games and at home with the undemonstrative but deeply emotional Gallagher family. Eventually Tommy, who has discovered that skateboarding provides a good outlet for his repressed feelings, winds up with a separated shoulder that keeps him out of the championship game. But even from the sidelines, he manages to make a key contribution to the game, and in the best traditions of sports writing, this will leave readers both breathless and thoughtful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)