PICK-UP GAME A Full Day of Full Court

Some of YA literature’s brightest lights offer interlinked short stories, interspersed with poems by Charles R. Smith, Jr., all set on and around a Greenwich Village basketball court. There’s some trash talk and rough language but never anything that would give this other than a PG rating. The cadences of the narrators are lilting, fast, sassy, and smart. They express feelings of joy about the game and sound as though they’re performing jazz. The cast is wide and varied—white, Puerto Rican, Native American, African- American, old, young, male, female—and all sound authentic. A subtle background sound of people playing basketball whenever one of the poems is read makes for great ambience. Listeners will find themselves enthralled. G.D. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2012 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2012]