Wasn't as Swaggy as I thought

By Andres H.

Jonas Dolan is a basketball prodigy who moved from Redwood City, California to Seattle, Washington due to his father being fired from his work. Jonas wants to get a basketball scholarship, but in order to do that, he needs to keep up his grades up and play good basketball. Unfortunately, at this new school he is having a very tough time doing so.

The basketball Coach for Jonas’s new high school, Coach Knecht, did not play Jonas that much. Jonas and  Coach Knecht did not get along very well. The coach met this guy named Mr. Hartwell has been following the games and became an informal coach for the kids. After about a week Mr. Hartwell becomes the assistant coach of the team and builds a good relationship with the team. Soon after, The head coach suffers an accident on the court. Mr. Hartwell takes over the team and everyone is pumped. Jonas and his best friend Levi are probably the most psyched to have him as the head coach.

After a while, Jonas starts to question how good of a person Mr. Hartwell really is after he invites the team over to his house for a party and serves alcohol.  Jonas didn’t understand the sick side to Mr. Hartwell after Levi informed him that he had been sexually assaulting him. After this incident the team still has to win a championship, and Jonas is still trying to pursue his dream of college basketball. Also, at the same time he is comforting Levi.

This book was very well written with lots of description and emotion tied into it. Although the book was well written there were also lots of dry spots that were very boring and made me want to put the book down and stop reading.  The idea of this story could’ve been very good and well thought out, but the author took it overboard about the whole sexual assault incident. I was very sickened by that and immediately put the book down and stopped reading it for a while. I eventually skipped that part, but the author should not have included that in the novel. For me at least, it ruined the book and made the book go from about an eight out of ten to probably a two out of ten. Overall the book was written nicely and had lots of good emotion, but there were some dry spots. This book was ruined by the author due to his unnecessary content in his piece.

This book was pretty sickening and it is unfortunate that one part ruined the whole book for me. I originally picked this up because I love sports, but I was upset to find out what it was really about. If you get sickened easily or have low tolerance for stuff like that you shouldn’t bother taking it off the shelf.