Klass, David, and Perri Klass. Second Impact.

Klass, David, and Perri Klass.  Second Impact.  Macmillan/Farrar Strauss      2013  279p  $16.99  ISBN 978-0-374-37996-4  hs  Realistic fiction  E-BN

Jerry Downing and Carla Jensen, who share a high-school English class, blog about football in small-town America (specifically New Jersey).  The community culture, the pressure on the players, the consequences of bad choices, and most importantly the topical issues of head injury in high-school sports all come to play in the dialog that ensues in the blogs of both students. Jerry, the football jock, and Carla, the sports writer for the school paper, provide the two main perspectives of this story.  It is told almost completely in the form of blog posts, a device that serves as an intriguing and successful method of recounting past and present events in the story. E-mails between the two are also employed in the writing of this book, to address more personal issues between and about the two bloggers.  The emphasis on the pressure to play when injured, whether internal or from the team, really struck a note, and will do so with high-school readers as well.  The very topical debate about sports injuries, specifically concussion and other kinds of head trauma, is well presented from many perspectives.  There is just enough medicine to be informative without being preachy.  High-school athletes will gravitate to this book because of its cover.  They’ll be kept interested by the subject and the very appealing format.  It is only the “party” elements and related issues that keep this from being a middle-school possibility as well.         

Summary: Jerry Downing and Carla Jensen, who share a high-school English class, blog about football in small-town America (specifically New Jersey).  The community culture, the pressure on the players, the consequences of bad choices, and most importantly the topical issues of head injury in high-school sports all come to play in the dialog that ensues in the blogs of both students.

Sports injuries-Fiction, Sports-Fiction                           --Lynn Fisher