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Summary
Summary
This thrilling basketball story from New York Times bestselling author Walter Dean Myers is a strong choice for independent reading and sharing in the classroom. Thought-provoking and packed with court action, Game is a winner.
Drew Lawson knows basketball is taking him places. It has to, because his grades certainly aren't. But lately his plan has run squarely into a pick. Coach has handed the ball to another player--Tomas, a new guy from Europe--and Drew won't let anyone disrespect his game. Just as his team makes the playoffs, Drew must come up with something big to save his fading college prospects. It's all up to Drew to find out just how deep his game really is.
"There's plenty of basketball here, but, as in any good sports novel, more is going on than the sport; life is the game, and this is a sensitive portrait of a likable young man, his family, city and dreams." (Kirkus starred review)
"In this story of a teen who dreams of making it big in the NBA, Myers returns to the theme that has dominated much of his serious fiction: How can young black urban males negotiate the often-harsh landscape of their lives to establish a sense of identity and self-worth As always, Myers eschews easy answers." (School Library Journal)
Walter Dean Myers was a New York Times bestselling author, Printz Award winner, five-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, two-time Newbery Honor recipient, and the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Maria Russo, writing in the New York Times, called Myers "one of the greats and a champion of diversity in children's books well before the cause got mainstream attention."
Author Notes
Walter Dean Myers was born on August 12, 1937 in Martinsberg, West Virginia. When he was three years old, his mother died and his father sent him to live with Herbert and Florence Dean in Harlem, New York. He began writing stories while in his teens. He dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army at the age of 17. After completing his army service, he took a construction job and continued to write.
He entered and won a 1969 contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children, which led to the publication of his first book, Where Does the Day Go? During his lifetime, he wrote more than 100 fiction and nonfiction books for children and young adults. His works include Fallen Angels, Bad Boy, Darius and Twig, Scorpions, Lockdown, Sunrise Over Fallujah, Invasion, Juba!, and On a Clear Day. He also collaborated with his son Christopher, an artist, on a number of picture books for young readers including We Are America: A Tribute from the Heart and Harlem, which received a Caldecott Honor Award, as well as the teen novel Autobiography of My Dead Brother.
He was the winner of the first-ever Michael L. Printz Award for Monster, the first recipient of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults. He also won the Coretta Scott King Award for African American authors five times. He died on July 1, 2014, following a brief illness, at the age of 76.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Horn Book Review
Drew is the star of his Harlem high school basketball team, and he's counting on that to carry him to college. When the coach starts favoring other players, including a new student from Prague, Drew must reevaluate his attitude and become a team player. The wealth of game details will appeal to basketball fans, and the Harlem setting is vividly described. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Harlem teen Drew Lawson thinks that he has the big-money skills for the NBA. Now a senior, he plans to play his best game, attract scouts, and earn a scholarship that will, he hopes, lead to the pros. Then his coach begins to favor a new, white player, and Drew struggles to overcome his anger and to maintain his drive. Basketball fans will love the long passages of detailed court action, and Myers extends the sports metaphors into Drew's own questions about the future possibilities for himself and his peers, particularly the struggling young men in his neighborhood, whom he sees as a bunch of guys in a game. They were falling behind every minute that passed, but they had lost interest in the score. Myers explores his themes with a veteran writer's skill. Passages that could have read as heavy-handed messages come across, instead, as the authentic thoughts of a strong, likable, African American teen whose anxieties, sharp insights, and belief in his own abilities will captivate readers of all backgrounds.--Engberg, Gillian Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SUDDENLY unmoored in her 41st year, Amy Lamb is drifting in a familiar midlife sea of ambivalence and regret. Like many other Manhattan mothers, she left a career to raise her child. But now her son, Mason, is 10 and increasingly independent; Leo, her kindly, overworked husband, is more and more remote, burrowing ever deeper into the files he brings home at night. And as for her long-lost career - she was a corporate lawyer in the middling firm where she'd met Leo - well, it was really never that absorbing. Amy's circle includes Roberta Sokolov, an artist turned full-time mother whose own career, like Amy's, never quite blossomed, and Jill Hamlin, her best friend from college, who carries around a whole satchelful of disappointments: a failed dissertation, years of infertility, an inability to connect with her placid, adopted daughter. As in earlier novels like "The Wife" and "This Is Your Life," Meg Wolitzer presents a taxonomy of the subspecies known as the urban female. Lavishly educated and ruefully self-aware, the women in "The Ten-Year Nap" are never quite at the top of their game, time and success having passed them by - because of their gender, weak ambition, middling talent or some combination thereof. Amy and her friends aren't total losers, they're just not big technicolor winners. Caught between the second and third waves of feminism, they've created lives - as daughters do - in opposition to those of their mothers. All this could make for a dreary soup, except that it's a Wolitzer novel, so it's very entertaining. The tartly funny Wolitzer is a miniaturist who can nail a contemporary type, scene or artifact with deadeye accuracy. Amy, for example, is exasperated by her son's fondness for science fiction. Noting that the book he's chosen for their bedtime reading has a "crenelated and immodestly faux-filigreed" spine, she mocks its portentous, inanely named characters: "But the Moorchaser, of course, was not a man, he was a Frailkin, and none of his species had ever entered the Zone before." "What the hell is a Frailkin?" Amy wonders irritably. New York, post-9/11, is also a character, displaying a "dented, temporary quality that made it seem even more valuable, in the way that fragility always increases the price of a thing of beauty." Amy and her family live in a "huge, homely rental building," unable to afford to buy their own place. "The rent battered and shook them; it sucked the money away from them each month as if it were stored in the wind tunnel of the lobby." Amy develops a girl crush, as women often do, on Penny Ramsey, the "tiny, golden-headed" director of a small urban museum. She's a paragon, with her three handsome children, her hedge-fund-manager husband, her fulfilling job and her perfect baby sitter, who deploys the phrase "cruciferous vegetables" with aplomb. Penny, it turns out, is having an affair with an adorable young British art curator. Soon Amy becomes the audience that supports and fuels their relationship, its drama distracting her from her own existential malaise. The central question of "The Ten-Year Nap"-what is the proper role for a postindustrial, post-second-wave-of-feminism woman at midlife? Or, to paraphrase Roberta, "How will you bear the rest of your life?" - is given a medley of answers. Wolitzer has structured her book so the present-day action alternates with chapters from the past - vignettes of Roberta's, Amy's and Jill's mothers and other female role models. The painter Magritte's devoted wife makes a confounding appearance: her role in life was to be her husband's model. You get what Wolitzer is trying to do (shades of "The Hours" here), but it can be distracting: so many women! There's the string theorist mother at the elite boys' school Roberta's and Amy's sons attend (maybe Wolitzer just finds the words "string theorist" innately funny, and gets a kick out of typing them?); the divorced anorexic with her death's-head and tiny body; and even a house-husband, about whom Wolitzer writes, "You were initially pleased by him, but then after a short while you felt slightly annoyed. He seemed like a loiterer here in the world that the women had formed for themselves." The husbands are by and large a saintly lot, working like dogs to support wives set free first from the professional grind and now from the tedium of caring for young children. Amy's husband transgresses in tiny, sad ways: padding himself at night with cookies ; cheating, as Amy discovers, on his expense reports. The denouement of Penny and lan's fling is jarring and more than a little bizarre, after which Penny retreats into the insulated worlds of her marriage and her class. (Rich people are different.) Amy, Jill and Roberta click back into gear too, in small but nonetheless forward-moving ways. Wolitzer, whose characters can sometimes be almost too tidy - or too much of a type - has given this group a not altogether tidy resolution. Which seems only fair. As Jill says: "This is the ending. It's just not satisfying, that's all." The ambivalent women in Meg Wolitzer's latest novel left their careers to raise their children. Penelope Green is a reporter for the House & Home section of The Times.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-In this story of a teen who dreams of making it big in the NBA, Myers returns to the theme that has dominated much of his serious fiction: How can young black urban males negotiate the often-harsh landscape of their lives to establish a sense of identity and self-worth? Drew Lawson is a very good high school player who is staking his future on the wildly improbable chance that he will achieve professional stardom. He is not an outstanding student, and he feels that basketball is the only thing that lifts him above the ranks of the ordinary. As he surveys his Harlem neighborhood, he worries that if he does not succeed in sports, he will become like so many other young men he sees around him who continue to talk tough, but have stopped believing in themselves, and are betrayed by "the weakness in their eyes." Harlem itself is a looming presence in the novel: vibrant, exciting, dirty, dangerous, it is the only home that Drew has ever known and to a large extent it both defines and limits his outlook. Being no more or less insightful or articulate (or self-absorbed) than most 17-year-olds, he fails to connect with those adults who have overcome racism, bad luck, and their own missteps to find alternative ways to succeed. As always, Myers eschews easy answers, and readers are left with the question of whether or not Drew is prepared to deal with the challenges that life will inevitably hand him.-Richard Luzer, Fair Haven Union High School, VT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Drew Lawson is a basketball player in Harlem with "big-money dreams." He's not about gangs or running the streets, just ball, and he hopes he has more to him than those lost to the streets, enough to carry him to a Division I university and on to the NBA. He just has to live up to his ability. But always, just below the surface, is Drew's awareness of the stoops and street corners where people fall behind on their games and lose interest in the score. Drew has a strong family, including a smart, pretty, sassy sister to keep him focused. Drew knows who he is, and he's intent on not blowing his chances. The author's knowledge of basketball shows in the expertly realized game sequences. There's plenty of basketball here, but, as in any good sports novel, more is going on than the sport; life is the game, and this is a sensitive portrait of a likable young man, his family, city and dreams. A good match with Myers's Monster (1999) and Slam (1996). (Fiction. 11+) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Game Chapter One "Yo, Drew, here's the story!" Jocelyn called me from the living room. She and Mom were already sitting on the couch across from the television. Pops came out of the bathroom in his undershirt and started to say something, but Mom held her hand up. "Wait a minute, honey," she said. "They're talking about that stickup on 126th Street." Pops looked at me. There was a commercial on the television. "It's coming up next," Jocelyn said. A moment later a woman's face filled the screen. What's happening with the youth of America? Well, if you're talking about the young people in our inner cities, the picture is far from pretty. Today two high school boys were involved in a vicious robbery and shoot-out in New York's Harlem community. The image on the screen switched to a picture of the police stretching yellow tape across the sidewalk in front of a discount store. At one thirty this afternoon, two boys, boys who should have been in school, attempted to hold up this store on 126th Street and Lenox Avenue. As they made their way from the store and down the busy street, they encountered an off-duty policeman, who immediately sensed what was going on. The two youths shot at the policeman, who returned fire. The result: a badly frightened and wounded clerk in the store, a sixteen-year-old in police custody, and a seventeen-year-old fatally wounded. The country's educational mantra these days is "No Child Left Behind." Tragically, this is yet another example of the growing number of children left behind on the cold streets of New York. In Lebanon, negotiators have reached a tentative agreement . . . Jocelyn switched channels. "They didn't even give their names," Mom said. "That's because they weren't eighteen yet," Pops said. "You can read about it in the papers tomorrow." "It just tears me up to see young people wasting their lives like that," Mom said. "Every time you pick up the newspaper, every time you switch on the television, it's more of our young men either killed or going to jail. Lord have mercy! There just doesn't seem to be an end to it. Now there's a young man with all his life in front of him, and I know his parents wanted the best for him. Lying out on the sidewalk. It just . . . oh, Lord have mercy!" Mom's voice was cracking, and I wondered why Jocelyn even had the story on. She knew how it upset Mom. She had always worried about me and Jocelyn, but then when my man Ruffy's brother was arrested right after Christmas, she got really messed around. "I still think you children should finish school down south." Mom was on her feet. She had the towel in her hand she had been using to dry the dishes. "It's just safer down there." Pops started in about how it wasn't any safer in Savannah, which is where my grandmother lived, than it was in Harlem. I went back to my room, and Jocelyn followed me in and plunked herself down on the end of my bed. "Why don't you go to your own room, girl?" "Why don't you let me borrow your cell until I get mine fixed?" "No." "Drew, you ain't got nobody to call. Let me use your phone." "Those guys must have been on crack or something," I said. "Pulling a stickup in the middle of the day." "So when do you pull your stickups?" "Jocelyn, shut up and get off my bed." "How long you think Mom is going to be upset?" she asked, not budging from the bed. I took my sneakers off and threw them near her. "Yo, even when Mom's not acting worried, she's upset," I said. "I only got the rest of the year to go at Baldwin. You're the one she's going to send down south." "I was thinking that maybe I should just go to Hollywood and start my career," Jocelyn said. "I thought you were going to go to Harvard first." "I could commute back and forth." "And you could get off my bed so I can get some rest." Jocelyn got up, picked up one of my sneakers, sniffed it, and then staggered out of the room. The only time our neighborhood made the news was when something bad went down, and the talk in school was about the shooting and who knew the guy who had been killed. It was a hot subject in the morning but had cooled down by lunchtime. A helicopter had gone down in Afghanistan, and that made the front page of the newspaper. The main inside story was about some girl singer getting a divorce and accusing her husband of fooling around with her sister. That was good, because I knew Mom would be looking for news about the shooting. Everything that went down wrong in the neighborhood upset her. I could dig where she was coming from. There had been a time, a few years ago, when the shootings and all the drug stuff were just background noise. You heard about it happening, but unless some kid my age or Jocelyn's age was hit by a stray bullet, it didn't seem that real. But when I reached fifteen, it was boys my age being shot. Mom was always warning me to be careful and stay away from gangs. That's what she understood most--the gangs. She knew I wasn't about gangs. I was about ball. Ball made me different than guys who ended up on the sidewalk framed by some yellow tape. "Basketball is wonderful, Son," Mom would say. "And I'm sure glad you're playing sports instead of running the streets." She would let it go at that, but I knew she had listened to people talking about how hard it was to make it in basketball. I knew that, too. But I also knew that even if I didn't make it . . . Game . Copyright © by Walter Myers . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Game by Walter Dean Myers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.