Run the Game

Gr 11 Up—When 19-year-old Alexander Franklin meets 14-year-old prostitute "Patti Smith" at the A-Lot in broken-down Beaver Falls, it's love at first sight. He can't live without her, and neither can the town's drug lord Burke, which makes being with her extremely dangerous. The story begins when Alexander sees Patti for the first time, and what follows are more than 500 pages of their drug-and-alcohol-soaked love affair. He spends most of his days shooting heroin, having graphic sex, playing guitar in a band with his friends, and obsessing about Patti. However, there are powerful people who don't want them to be together, and the consequences of their intense romance are tragic. Most of the characters are flat and one-dimensional archetypes. There are sparks of sympathetic moments hidden in the text, but not enough to really flesh out Alexander as a person. The ending leaves readers with a dark message. The over-the-top, extremely explicit sexual content, drug use, and profanity feel as if they are included more for shock value than as devices to further the plot. Teens looking for gritty reads with substantial characters would do better with novels by Ellen Hopkins or Walter Dean Myers.—Kimberly Garnick Giarratano, Northampton Community College, Hawley, PA