Publishers Weekly
Opening with an incantatory poem from Smith ("faces behind fences/ focused courtside/ on warriors being tested/ with noplace to hide"), this collection is made up of rapid-fire short stories that take place over a single day on a famed New York City streetball court—"the Cage"—from such authors as Walter Dean Myers, Sharon Flake, Rita Williams-Garcia, Robert Lipsyte, and Adam Rapp. Interwoven with additional poems and photos from Smith, the stories offer blistering moves and dialogue, complex and rewarding characters, and off-the-court background, contextualizing the game and making it clear just how vital it is to those who play. Ages 14–up. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
Nine all-stars in the field of YA lit contribute stories...an anthology of standalone stories that invite - no, demand - a straight read-through.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)
Tying all the stories together is a shared love and respect not only for the game itself, but also for the lavishly talented (and all-too-often fatally flawed) legends od New York City playground basketball. An outstanding collection that belongs in every high school library.
—School Library Journal (starred review)
Superb stories by writers who know and love the game; and ode to the show.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
School Library Journal
Gr 8 Up—Some of the most distinguished names in YA literature are represented in this collection of linked stories set on a celebrated New York City playground basketball court known as the Cage. Such luminaries as Walter Dean Myers, Bruce Brooks, Rita Williams-Garcia, and Robert Lipsyte examine the ways in which players, wannabes, and hangers-on interact in the vibrant, freewheeling subculture of inner-city playground hoops. All of the action takes place on one day, with recurring characters. The contributors offer different takes on them, forcing readers to consider the individuals from a variety of points of view. It is fascinating to see how these writers bring their own unique social and artistic vision to the portrayal of the individuals who weave in and out of the narratives. The stories are of uniformly high quality; one of the real crowd-pleasers is Sharon G. Flake's "Virgins Are Lucky," which stars a sassy, self-respecting girl who decides not to text the handsome star player who has so casually given her his number. Other characters who will live on in readers' memories are Adam Rapp's smart-mouthed, sensitive eighth-grader recently rescued from homelessness by a brooding Iraq War veteran and Joseph Bruchac's Native American man, stricken with respiratory problems as a result of his rescue work at the World Trade Center. Tying all the stories together is a shared love and respect not only for the game itself, but also for the lavishly talented (and all-too-often fatally flawed) legends of New York City playground basketball. An outstanding collection that belongs in every high school library.—Richard Luzer, Fair Haven Union High School, VT
APRIL 2012 - AudioFile
Some of YA literature’s brightest lights offer interlinked short stories, interspersed with poems by Charles R. Smith, Jr., all set on and around a Greenwich Village basketball court. There’s some trash talk and rough language but never anything that would give this other than a PG rating. The cadences of the narrators are lilting, fast, sassy, and smart. They express feelings of joy about the game and sound as though they’re performing jazz. The cast is wide and varied—white, Puerto Rican, Native American, African- American, old, young, male, female—and all sound authentic. A subtle background sound of people playing basketball whenever one of the poems is read makes for great ambience. Listeners will find themselves enthralled. G.D. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2012 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
Gladiators meet at the Cage, a fenced-in basketball court at West 4th in Manhattan, one of the legendary sites of playground ball. Sportswriter Rick Telander titled his classic basketball story Heaven Is a Playground, and that's certainly the description of the Cage, where ballers come "wearing attitude like / baggy shorts," and high-flying slams, rainbows and double dunks offer aerial thrills as good as fireworks. Here are the players, the mentors, the used-to-bes and the wannabes, the scouts, the filmmakers, the ghosts and the legends. Some of the best contemporary writers for teens—Walter Dean Myers, Robert Lipsyte, Rita Williams-Garcia, Joseph Bruchac and others—contribute to this novel in linked short stories, in which the players weave their way through one day at the Cage, and Charles R. Smith ties the volume together with rap poems celebrating the place, the people and the throbbing energy of the game—as Walt Whitman might have had he been a baller. Superb stories by writers who know and love the game; an ode to the show. (Linked short stories. 14 & up)
