The Final Four by Paul Volponi

    Every once in a while, dur­ing March Mad­ness, a small mid-major bas­ket­ball team will make a deep run in the NCAA bas­ket­ball tour­na­ment. The Troy State Tro­jans from Alabama are that team in Paul Volponi’s excel­lent young adult novel The Final Four. In it, the Tro­jans are squar­ing off against one of basketball’s elite, the Michi­gan State Spar­tans, in one of two final four matchups.
The story is told dur­ing the actual game itself. In fact, the entire novel takes place dur­ing the game’s sev­eral over­time ses­sions. The bas­ket­ball action is edge of your seat excit­ing, with Volponi call­ing the game clearly enough to cre­ate a vivid pic­ture in the minds of his read­ers.
The rest of the novel is told through flash­backs that chron­i­cle the lives of four of the game’s play­ers. Each brings his own unique story to the novel.  Mal­colm McBride is the hot­shot fresh­man point guard from MSU who has declared that he’s a one and done player. Next year, he says, he’ll be play­ing in the NBA. How­ever, his tough, cocky exte­rior masks the pain that he still feels over the death of his sis­ter who was the vic­tim of a drive-by shoot­ing in inner-city Detroit. Troy’s pow­er­ful shoot­ing guard, Roko “Red Bull” Bacic came to the U.S. from war-ravaged Croa­tia. He car­ries his own pain, the mem­ory of his uncle who talk him to play, but was trag­i­cally killed dur­ing the war. Crispin Rice, Troy’s cen­ter, has been in the media spot­light ever since propos­ing to his girl­friend on screen just after a nation­ally tele­vised game. The con­stant atten­tion is putting a strain on his rela­tion­ship and is affect­ing his play. And MSU’s shoot­ing guard, Michael Jor­dan, a solid but not spec­tac­u­lar player, who must live with being the name­sake of the more famous and bet­ter Michael Jor­dan while try­ing to fig­ure out his role with his team.
    The Final Four suc­cess­fully com­bined excit­ing sports action with believ­able sto­ries of per­sonal inter­est. I found myself just as inter­ested in find­ing out who would win the game as I did in each player’s per­sonal jour­ney. With­out ques­tion, The Final Four is one of the best sports books (young adult or adult) that I’ve read, and I rec­om­mend giv­ing it a shot.

–Reviewed by Mr. Patrick

How do you pronounce conch?

KAHNGK (like conk)

“Though Sir William Gold­ing con­sis­tently pro­nounced the word as [KAHNCH] in a lec­ture that he gave on The Lord of the Flies and other mat­ters at the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford in Feb­ru­ary 1990, the more usual stan­dard pro­nun­ci­a­tion is [KAHNGK].” Now that we’ve set­tled that mat­ter, how does one pro­nounce Ramen, as in Ramen noodles?

Elster, Charles Har­ring­ton. The Big Book of Beastly Mis­pro­nun­ci­a­tions: The Com­plete Opin­ion­ated Guide for the Care­ful Speaker. Boston: Houghton Mif­flin, 1999. Print.

Need a bookmark? Ask for a baseball card bookmark at the circulation desk

Save your place in the book your read­ing AND study the sta­tis­tics of you favorite ballplay­ers. Who would have known? Turns out that 2 base­ball cards lam­i­nated together makes a pretty nifty book­mark. If you’d like one, please just ask Mrs. Har­ri­son or Mr. Patrick.

Also, do you have old trad­ing cards at home that you no longer want? Rather than pitch­ing them in the trash, con­sider donat­ing them to the media cen­ter so that they can be turned into book­marks as well.