The Moves Make the Man

Wonderful, engrossing and wise, full of sharp scenes which I keep wanting to tell other people about. Impossible to do justice to the plot and describe the way that basketball moves and, to a lesser extent, baseball moves (practically meaningless to me) feature so centrally in story and meanings. Playing the game is a solitary activity for the two main characters involving not just skill but also integrity, and their moves are set against the wider context of their relationships. Jerome Fox, the single, token black boy in the white school, begins the book attempting to track the mystery, the truth of Bix Rivers, another intense game player who could not make the right moves in life, who could only play fair, keep to the truth. It's a special book but there's work to be done to help most pupils past the language of the sports.