Rapunzel (Mccafferty)

List Price: 3.99

Our Price: $3.60

Product Details

Can we help?:

• Ask us a question
• Submit a Product Review
• Send to a Friend
• Schedule a Gift Reminder

Description: Rapunzel (Mccafferty)

Genre: Modern fiction; Social Issues - Friendship; Emotional problems; Juvenile Fiction; Children's 12-Up - Fiction - General; Children: Young Adult (Gr. 10-12); Children: Young Adult (Gr. 7-9); Social Issues - Prejudice & Racism; Sports & Recreation - Basketball; Juvenile Fiction / Sports & Recreation / Basketball; Social Issues - General; Afro-Americans; Fiction; Friendship;

Average Review: 5 stars

Review: Teens Bond over Sports: The first thing this book has going for it is its narrator. Jerome is bright and witty. He is a black kid in junior high school who lives with his mother and two brothers. We learn that Jerome has some tough things in his life. First of all, he has no father; his father died so long ago, Jerome doesn't even remember him. Second, Jerome is so smart he is in a bunch of accelerated classes that set him aside from his friends. Third of all, this year the all-white high school has decided to start the integration process by adding a single black student--Jerome. It seems like this book could be about how hard Jerome's life is, but it's not. Jerome mentions these things, but he doesn't see any of them as setbacks. He is confident enough about himself that nothing seems to faze him. He is free to write this book about his best friend, Bix. Bix is a boy Jerome meets when he goes to this new high school. Jerome had admired his baseball-playing skills over the summer, but he didn't know who this boy was. Jerome, as a fantastic basketball player, admired the pure athletic ability and grace that he saw in Bix. When the two boys end up as the only guys in a home economics class, they begin to bond a little bit. Bix is strange to Jerome. He is concerned with not lying, and the sheer thought of lying seems to bother him a great deal. When he asks Jerome to teach him to play basketball, a foreign sport to him, Jerome finds him a fast learner--except when it comes to moves, to faking someone out. That's just too much like lying for Bix. He says that he could beat someone with the pure game, and not have to pull any of the fancy moves Jerome tries to teach him. But will he be able to stick to that when it really counts? I loved Jerome's voice. He was honest and funny, and he accepted who and what he was without complaining about his situation. I didn't like that the end of the story was unresolved. I wasn't sure how to react to Bix's stepfather, and that bothered me. I wasn't sure if he was the bad guy or not.