Unstoppable

Author of the best-selling Jamie Johnson football series, Dan Freedman once again makes soccer the cornerstone of his latest novel, and does so extremely well. But off the pitch, his characters remain two-dimensional and their dialogue has none of the salty rhythms of actual street speech so well caught by Angie Thomas in The Hate U Give and On the Come Up.  The story revolves around mixed-race fourteen-year-old Roxy and her twin brother Kaine, much the darker of the two.  Once close, they now get on badly, with their unemployed Dad regularly making things worse.  And life on their London estate contains extra dangers, with Kaine getting too close to gang warfare for anyone’s comfort, least of all his own.

But with such a firm authorial hand on the tiller, readers will soon realise that everything is going to work out well in the end, with once oppressive family debts somehow paid and minor characters happily married off while tricky ones suddenly turn into selfless supporters of others. Serviceably written, avoiding highlights as well as low moments, this is fiction at its blandest. It is only when we get to sport, either when Kaine is playing football or when his sister is fighting to win on the tennis court, that things start taking off. Not so much a fictional victory then, but certainly a draw, hard fought to the end.