Run the Game

VOYA - Valerie Burleigh

Alexander has made many choices, many of the wrong ones. His days are filled with getting high and doing what it takes to survive. When he befriends a girl years younger, Patti, he feels a spark of humanity and hopes that maybe life can get better. The glimpse into Alexander's mind and daily life is truly heartbreaking as he goes from hit to hit, without ever making an actual break from the sordid world in which he lives. Selling himself for that next hit changes him in ways he could not predict or imagine, and even the hope of true love cannot save him in the end. Written in Myers's gritty style with very graphic descriptions, this story does not camouflage the world of drug abuse, child prostitution, and hopelessness found in many cities today. While we get glimpses of what has caused much of Alexander's despair, we never fully understand his hurt and rage until he is able to exact revenge. In the end, we hope that Alexander and Patti will begin life anew, but as the title states, it has been a game all along. Reviewer: Valerie Burleigh

School Library Journal

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

Kirkus Reviews

A 19-year-old junkie with delusions of grandeur falls for a 14-year-old prostitute in this poor approximation of a Chuck Palahniuk novel. Drug addict and punk guitarist Alexander spends his days in a depressed Midwestern town drinking enough alcohol and smoking and shooting enough drugs to put down a bull elephant. Still, he manages to show up to band practice on time and woo Patti, a mullet-headed, song-writing Lolita whose motives are suspect from page one. Alexander believes that he and Patti will run away to New York and live druggily ever after. But after Patti's drug dealer/pimp threatens to chop off his limbs with a chain saw and leave him to "these four rabid badgers that I keep… in a shack," he has second thoughts. It's written like a bad rap song; readers will have four-letter-word fatigue within the first 20 pages--and there are still nearly 500 to go. The characters are flat, the constant drug use gratuitous and the graphic, occasionally violent sex scenes pornographic. By the time the author commits the cardinal sin of plugging one of his own previous titles within the text, readers will be too numb to care. Teens looking for gritty content are better off checking out the award-winning work of Adam Rapp or Ellen Hopkins. Dreadful. (Fiction. 16 & up)