Roughnecks

by Thomas Cochran

Overview

Once in a while you get a second chance. For Travis Cody this is one of those times. His team, the Oil Camp Roughnecks, is facing the Pineview Pelicans for the state championship. Travis will have forty-eight minutes head-to-head with rival Jericho Grooms. Forty-eight minutes to redeem himself for letting Grooms break him on the play that cost the Roughnecks an undefeated season. Forty-eight minutes to prove he isn’t a quitter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780152022006
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/31/1999
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,113,918
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Lexile:	800L (what's this?)
Age Range:	12 - 13 Years

Editorial Reviews

"This book brings life back to high school football. It shows it’s all about passion, glory, and the strength to overcome your greatest fears.”—Dan Marino, Miami Dolphins
"A promising debut: thematically complex, strongly written.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Authentic, intense....A very promising first novel.”—Booklist
"A winning combination....Uplifting.”—Publishers Weekly
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From the Publisher

Cochran's first novel puts a fresh angle on a familiar story: Rival high-school football teams square off for the state championship. Instead of putting readers on the field, though, Cochran takes them inside one player's head for a full day's mental preparation, rituals, flashbacks, and general ruminations.

Senior Travis Cody, raised in a Louisiana town so obsessed with the sport that every boy gets a toy football at birth, looks with mixed feelings at what will most likely be his final game. He is eager to face the team that handed the Oil Camp Roughnecks its only defeat in the regular season, but all the backslapping and boosterism is beginning to wear thin, and the once-remote prospect of life after football is upon him. Rising before dawn on game day, Travis mulls over the personalities and personal influences of nearly everyone he knows, recapping the history of his dying oil town, college plans, football's pleasures, pains, and character-building aspects, and other topics. With an artfully suspenseful set of pre-game preparations, the stage is set, but the characters remain stuck in prescribed, limited roles; Travis occasionally sounds more like an adult looking back than a teenager looking ahead. Cochran primes readers for an explosive contest, then pulls out the rug by ending the story after one play—closure on an intellectual level, but not an emotional one. Despite the unevenness, this is a promising debut: thematically complex, strongly written.

Kirkus Reviews