Thirteen-year-old Jordie’s parents are always fighting. He knows some of the fights are over money, with the auto plant where his dad works shutting down, but sometimes it seems they just can’t communicate. Jordie hopes they can resolve their differences and tries to focus on leading his school basketball team, but then his dad, a former college basketball player who taught Jordie to love the game, suddenly moves out. Jordie doesn’t understand, until his dad tells him that he is gay. (This isn’t really a spoiler, since it’s on the book jacket.)
Jordie feels his world has been turned upside down, even more so when he learns his dad has a boyfriend. He has support, though, from his long-time friend Junior, a co-captain on the team with a sharp sense of humor, and from his budding romance with Tammy, a new girl in town who has tried out for the boy’s basketball team. He’s angry with his dad for lying and for leaving him and his mom, though, and this isn’t helped by the homophobia he experiences and the gossip that spreads in their small, working-class town. His anger comes out in ways that could cost him his place on the team—and cost him his relationships with Junior and Tammy. Yet it is these relationships that ultimately assist him, as Tammy brings her sense of social justice to bear and Junior shares something about himself that helps Jordie realize his friends need him as much as he needs them.
Authors Paul Coccia and Eric Walters have given us a thoughtful story that explores themes of masculinity, friendship, family change, and coming of age, while also looking at a parent’s coming out. Notable, too, is the book’s portrayal of two gay men who bust stereotypes: Jordie’s basketball-playing dad, a manager at an auto plant who worked his way up from the line and whose treasured possession is the ’69 Camero he rebuilt by hand, and his new boyfriend, a burly man who owns a butcher shop and drives a pickup truck.
Jordie and his family are presumed White; Junior is half Filipino (his other half is unspecified).
Content warning: In one scene, an adult character shows scars from when he tried to die by suicide when he was younger.
