A Book Review Starring "Game" by Walter Dean Myers

The short version:
New York City senior Drew is looking forward to the second half of basketball season. He's the starting guard at James Baldwin Academy and is hoping a winning season will translate into an athletic scholarship. But he'll have to adapt to the unexpected when a white transfer student gets a starting position and he's forced to consider his coach's team ethic even when he'd rather shoot and play individual ball.

The long version:
My first Walter Dean Myers book!

And what a great first book to start with. As you read his slim book (218 pages) you feel you're in trusted hands. He writes with a confidence and ease that masks the work he put into it.

Drew is an engaging main character you want to follow from the start. He's smart, interesting and well-liked, yet young and still has things to learn, especially when it comes to playing team basketball and adapting to other personalities. His first-person narration is very entertaining and a clear testament to the writer as Myers infuses his narrative with the vernacular of an African-American teen that's accessible and flows well throughout and at the same time is insightful within the mindset of a teen character.

There's a lot of basketball narration to the story. I always find description of sports events hard, even if you're familiar with the sport. Myers has lengthly narrations of multiple games, he not only creates narratives that are visual and fast paced like a game, but does so from Drew's point of view with a street and basketball slang mixed in that comes across seamlessly and makes for an easy read.

I couldn't help reflecting on Myer's New York Times editorial from last summer in which he reflected upon his own childhood growing up without books that were written about and for kids like him. You can't help but feel as if he wrote this book for his younger self, and all the younger selves of him out there today. "Game" was written in 2008 and there's some references to the internet or cell phones that put it in a present day historical context, but Myers also manages to give a nice sense of timelessness to it so you can see the book aging well for kids ten years down the line.

Regarding the size and page length. Myers manages to do a lot in 218 pages. It's a compact book, both in page number and size (maybe it's 8x6 inches, eyeballing it alone) and I think it makes for an inviting book, particularly when it comes to boys who aren't of the million-page-fantasy-tome reading variety. And I think there's something to be said for a book that doesn't physically intimidate a reluctant or occasional reader.