Who's DA MAN? The Crossover: The Graphic Novel by Kwame Alexander

JB AND I
are almost thirteen.

TWINS, two BASKETBALL
GOALS, at opposite ends
of the COURT.

I'm an inch taller with
DREADS to my NECK.

He gets his head SHAVED
once a MONTH.

I want to go to DUKE.
He flaunts
CAROLINA BLUE.

If we didn't LOVE each other
We'd HATE each other.

Basketball and competition run in the Bell Family. Famous locally as an international basketball star, his dad, know as "Da Man," Chuck Bell boasts that he "balled with Magic Johnson." The dreadlocked Josh goes for the flying slam dunk, and Jordan is the cool crossover shooter who makes all the threes. Together Josh and Jordan take their team to the playoffs for the championship game, but their unconcealed rivalry leads to a bet in which Josh forfeits his dreads and like Samson, fears he's lost his mojo.

And as the rivalry proceeds, Josh and Jordan find that they like the same girl, Alexis in the pink sneakers, but she chooses the fast-talking Jordan. Angry, Josh smolders until in the playoff his jealousy reaches the tipping point.

The crowd is screaming,
PASS THE BALL!

I see Jordan.
You want it that BAD?
HERE YA GO!

I pass it so hard it levels him, the BLOOD
from his NOSE still
SHOOTING long after the
shot-clock buzzer goes off.

Josh is suspended from the team, and still angry, he bets his dad, Da Man, that he can beat him in a quick one-on-one. Dad gets competitive, goes for a high-flying dunk, and collapses with a heart attack, foreshadowed by symptoms he's been keeping from the family.

The ball is passed to Josh and Jordan in a way they both didn't quite see coming.

Now who's going to have to be DA MAN?

In his new adaption of his 2015 Newbery Award winner, The Crossover (Graphic Novel) (The Crossover Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), Alexander's 2017 Newbery Award winner is a natural for a graphic novel. Author Alexander brilliantly makes the crossover and proves that he can rebound, too, in this powerful reexamination of what it means to have GAME. Alexander's writing in this graphic revisioning of his free-verse best-selling novel is equally powerful in its examination of the bravado up-and-down sides of the winning-is-all mystique, as he reworks his poetry into smart dialogue which heightens the conflict between the twins' competition as mirrored by their on-the-court conflict. The Emmy-winning artist Dawud Anyabwile's dramatic and insightful graphic art gives the story a flow which heightens the conflict inherent in this sports metaphor, making this almost mythic tale of rival fathers and sons accessible to a whole new audience for his earlier The Crossover (The Crossover Series) (see review here)

As I called it the first time--another SLAM DUNK for Kwame Christopher.

Other riveting middle-reader novels by Kwame Alexander include his novel about the twins' father's eighth-grade school days, Rebound (The Crossover Series) and the soccer novel Booked (The Crossover Series).

Now and Later: Rebound by Kwame Alexander

Skinny picks
some other boy
to be on his team,

which is cool with me,
'cause I'd much rather be
at home lying across my bed
reading comics.

See you tomorrow, I yell
but he's already on the court

running a game
and his mouth.

Charlie Bell is taking the sudden death of his father hard. Even basketball is no fun. His dad loved the game and was good at it, but now it makes Charlie sad, and suddenly he's bad at it. His refuge is his superhero comics.

The Fantastic Four, the Black Panther,
use the TIME DILATION EFFECT
to freeze EVERYTHING
and move them back
in time.

I wish I could do
the same thing.

Charlie can't get with the time or get himself together. He's running late for school and decides it's easier to skip school. He heads off for the Quik Mart with Skinny and his troublemaker older cousin Ivan, and they decide to fund the trip by swiping some empty soft drink bottles off Old Lady Wheeler's porch to fund some snacks--Funyons and a box of Now and Later candy. Only that night Charlie's mom finds the wrappers in the trash he forgot to take out. She wakes him up early to hear his story.

Tell me the truth, or else!

Or else what? I say, wondering how that slipped out.
And wishing it hadn't.

Or else turns out to be summer vacation spent with his grandparents. Grandma's fried chicken could put KFC out of business, but Grandpa means business. As soon as dinner is over, he puts Charlie behind the push mower, following him around the yard, teaching technique and pointing out every sprig Charlies misses. This is just the first quarter. We're just getting started, Chuck, he says.

The newly christened Chuck is in for a bit of shaping up. The only answer Grandpa will take is "Yessir" and to add to Charlie's penance, his girl cousin Roxie, plays basketball way better than he does and is as hard a taskmaster on court as Grandpa is at home. Charlie takes refuge in a stack of his dad's old comic books and in the fact that he's beginning to make his foul shots and snag some rebounds in his games with Roxie. By midsummer, Charlie has become Chuck. He's master of the push mower and is getting close to beating Roxie at H.O.R.S.E.

But then he sneaks off from the family Fourth of July barbecue to meet Skinny at the Roller Skating Rink in town, where again Ivan leaves the two younger boys holding the bag, this one filled with marijuana. Skinny and Charlie are arrested, and Charlie has plenty of time to think about how he got there while he waits at the jail.

If I ever get out of here, I'm gonna do better, I promise, Charlie tells himself as he waits at the police station.

Charlie imagines the Black Panther breaking through the door to rescue him.

But it's Grandpa and his lawyer friend Smitty who come through the door tobail him out and take him home.

"I'll tell you again, Chuck." says Grandpa. "This is a team sport. You can surround yourself with people who don't play by the rules, or you can surround yourself with those who do. If you choose wrong, don't start complaining when the coach takes you out of the game.

We're all suffering, but we still here, Chuck."

Sometimes you win the game with a slam dunk, and sometimes what wins the game is a rebound, in Kwame Alexander's forthcoming Rebound (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), the prequel to the author's 2015 Newbery Award-winning The Crossover. (see review here).  In the summer of 1988 Charlie becomes Chuck Bell, Da Man, college superstar, coach, and father to the rival brothers Josh and Jordan Bell, who in their time will also suffer the sudden loss of their father, Chuck.

Writing in a form of blank verse, the winner of multiple awards, Kwame Alexander, again gets inside his thirteen-year-old character's heart and mind at a crucial time in his life, a time when, as he says, he finds his way out of a black hole and into a life in which in twenty years his twin sons will want to honor his memory. As in his first book, Alexander makes use of basketball as a metaphor for life, with his thirteen-year-old protagonist on the cusp between childhood and maturity, now and later, like his favorite candy, in which Charlie learns that even when you shoot and miss, you always try to rebound your own shot.

Double Foul: After the Shot Drops by Randy Ribay

"Bunny's got the world looking out for him. I'm the only one in Wallace’s corner.”

If a middle-class black kid can be called a "golden boy," Bunny Thompson is that.

When Whitman High School's star sophomore player takes a scholarship at the upscale private St. Sebastian High School, he does it for the right reasons. His father's bookstore is failing, and his mom's night-shift job at the hospital is barely supporting the family, and Bunny feels that family loyalty means he must take an offer which can guarantee his college education.

But Nasir, left behind at Whitman High downtown, feels his best friend has deserted him for a posh spot on a team with the sure shot at a state championship. And when Nasir finds out that his cousin Wallace has been trying to raise rent money for his grandmother and himself by betting against Bunny and St. Sebastian, Nas feels duty-bound to do something to help. But Bunny keeps playing well and St. Sebastian keeps winning, and Wallace comes under heavy pressure from the gang to pay back his losses. He's frightened and begins carrying a gun in his car. Desperate, Wallace comes to Nasir and begs for help.

"Help me win one of these bets."

"How am I supposed to do that?" I ask.

"Make it so Bunny's not a factor. I mean, I want you to catch him on some recruiting violations so he can't play anymore. Be my inside man. Find something I can leak," Wallace says.

Reluctantly, Nasir agrees to help his cousin. He manages to steal Bunny's phone, which Wallace uses to send an email purportedly from Bunny to the New Jersey Athletic Association admitting that St. Sebastian offered him money to transfer and play basketball for them. Called on the carpet, Bunny explains that his phone has been stolen, but his coach benches him before the last regular season game, which his team surprisingly rallies to win without him.

Nasir is caught in the pivot position. If he clears Bunny by confessing he took the phone for Wallace, he's in major legal trouble and Wallace is left to the dubious mercy of the gamblers. And even when the Athletic Association learns that the email's IP proves Bunny couldn't have sent it, Bunny feels he's being double-teamed. He's caught between his loyalty to his friend and possible responsibility for Wallace's death and trying to throw the game to make his school lose the state championship.

Randy Ribay's After the Shot Drops (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) deals with the complexity of choice, showing once again that intricate conflicts of maturation can be mirrored in sports. Ribay avoids making race the center of the story, putting issues of family loyalty, class, school and team, friendship, and doing the right thing in play in this masterfully-paced young adult novel in which the three boys provide their own first-person narrative in succeeding chapters.

There are no slam-dunk answers for either Nasir or Bunny--or for Wallace, for that matter--in this taut narrative of moral equivalences. Although the focus is on the interplay of personalities and loyalties in the character-driven story, Ribay also deliver some taut game-play championship action in what is the climax--but not the denouement--of this novel. A variety of viewpoints, from Bunny's girlfriend Keyona to his father, sad at the loss of the bookstore than he loves, offers appeal to a wide range of young adult readers who will find some guidance in threading their way through those inevitable conflicts of conscience that growing up brings.

Doing It All! Stat: Home Court by Amar'e Studemire

I looked right at him and said, “Wanna bet?” I waited a few seconds until the court was quiet. I wanted everyone to hear this.

“Make it, take it,” I said.

“Sure,” said Carlos.

“I mean the court.” I said.

“Huh?” he said.

“Whoever wins gets the court,” I said. “Loser clears out for good.”

Eleven-year-old Amare figures he has nothing to lose. Those big, rough kids from outside the neighborhood have already taken over the court where Amare’s friends have always played basketball for fun after school. They are three hulks from a traveling team who don’t mind using their elbows and tripping anybody with the ball if they dare get into a game with them, and emboldened, Carlos, Yeti, and Ledge feel like they own the court now, while the rest of the kids have no place to take their game

Amare likes basketball, but he’s got a lot going on off the court as well. He likes being on the honor roll at school, skateboarding, and working for pay with his dad’s business on weekends. He doesn’t need this problem. But he knows his friends Mike and Deuce love to play.  Now push has come to shove, and Amare knows that it’s game on or give up.

NBA star Amare Stoudemire is doing for basketball what Ken Griffey, Jr., is doing for baseball novels for middle readers. In this semi-autobiographical novel , STAT: Standing Tall and Talented #1: Home Court (Scholastic Press, 2012), author Stoudemire shows that he’s got a lot going on, too. A fast-paced and authentic story of a pre-teen urban kid trying to find who he is on and off the court, the author provides plenty of play-by-play drama without stinting on the importance of peer friendships and family loyalties in that all-important maturational task of making choices. Told in first-person narrative with well-written dialogue and characterizations, this is a fine beginning to a sports fiction series for middle readers.

Just published (and just in time for Christmas gifting) other books in this promising series are STAT: Standing Tall and Talented #2: Double Team and STAT #3: Slam Dunk: Standing Tall and Talented.