Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘Reality Check’

Super Bowl Sunday

On Sundays we do beginnings, taking a look at the start of a Peter Abrahams novel, including those written under the Spencer Quinn moniker™. Since we’ve been checking out various football scenes and references from the PA shelf all week – and there are lots – how about we conclude with the beginning of Reality Check, my first young adult novel and winner of the Edgar Award in that category? There’s Sunday football, for the pros, and Saturday for the college boys, but Friday nights are for high school, and they have a magic all their own.

[“The best writer of psychological suspense around.”
– Laura Miller, Talk of the Nation, NPR]

Except for football Fridays, Cody Laredo’s favorite day of the school year was always the last. Now, May 30, final day of his sophomore year at County High, he sat in the back row of homeroom, waiting for the teacher – a sub he’d never seen before – to hand out the report cards. As long as there were no Fs – even one would make him ineligible for football in the fall, meaning summer school, an impossibility since he had to work – Cody didn’t care what was in the report card. He just wanted out.

Football Returns!

First NFL game of the season is tonight. Football comes up from time to time in my work, going all the way back to Hard Rain, and it’s central to the plot of Reality Check, my YA novel that won an Edgar award. There’s also football in the Chet and Bernie series, in Bark To The Future, the most recent C&B, and in Heart of Barkness, and elsewhere I can’t remember at the moment. This is from Heart of Barkness:

We walked onto the field, mostly dirt with tufts of grass here and there. Coach Flowers had moved out from between the two rows of players, now stood to the side. We stopped nearby. Coach Flowers put the whistle in his mouth, sort of nudging the stogie to one side, and talked around them.

“On the whistle, potato heads. Not before, not after. All set?”

He blew the whistle, a sound I hate, but at least I’d known it was coming. The two rows charged each other, thumping together with lots of grunts and shouts, none of the shouts actual words, more like the kind of noise you hear on Animal Planet. The kids finished knocking each other around, picked themselves up, dusted themselves off.

“What the heck?” said Coach Flowers. Or something like that – he wasn’t easy to understand with the whistle and stogie in his mouth. “Call that hitting? Don’t look like hitting to me. Looked like hugging your sister.”

One of the kids said, “I’m a sister, coach.”

Coach Flowers turned to her. “Did I ask for your opinion, Taneeka?”

“Not yet, coach.”

“Take a lap.”

Football

This is a big football weekend. Football comes up in my work from time to time, going all the way back to Hard  Rain, and it’s central to the plot of Reality Check (my YA novel that won an Edgar award). But there’s some in the Chet and Bernie series as well. This is from Heart of Barkness and I’ll post another snippet, a bit longer, next Saturday:

We kept running. And what a nice sight – Bernie was running as fast as I’d ever seen him. Which isn’t at all fast, not even for a human, probably on account of his leg wound in the war, but it made me so happy to see him back to running not fast. As for me and my running, let’s put it this way: I was delighted that the dart player turned out to be one of those humans who could really motor, especially after his flip flops flew off. Why hadn’t he gone into football or track instead of robbery? I wondered about that as I loped along behind him, trying not to catch up too soon and spoil the fun.

Beginnings

On Sundays we do beginnings, taking a look at the start of a Peter Abrahams novel, including those written under the Spencer Quinn moniker. How about Reality Check, my first young adult novel and winner of the Edgar Award in that category? (I heard from a school librarian this week who hands it out to boys who hate reading.)

[“The best writer of psychological suspense around.”
– Laura Miller, Talk of the Nation, NPR]

Except for football Fridays, Cody Laredo’s favorite day of the school year was always the last. Now, May 30, final day of his sophomore year at County High, he sat in the back row of homeroom, waiting for the teacher – a sub he’d never seen before – to hand out the report cards. As long as there were no Fs – even one would make him ineligible for football in the fall, meaning summer school, an impossibility since he had to work – Cody didn’t care what was in the report card. He just wanted out.