Knockout Games
Binding: Hardcover
Age 13+
General Fiction
A brutal and thought provoking novel based on true events by a celebrated African American author.
This is a novel of casual violence and all its consequences. It's brutal and thought-provoking. Greg's command of the teen voice is his gift but his skill is in the painstaking cultivation of each intricately researched "true story or event" (i.e. modern day African American cowboys in Philadelphia in Ghetto Cowboy or underground playground chesschampions in Chess Rumble.) These environments deliver his readers to a wonderfully confounding place between fact and fiction that make his narratives immediate and impossible to ignore. Knockout Games is set in modern day St. Louis amidst a disturbing rash of seemingly random attacks on bystanders by a group of urban teenagers in a crew called the TKO club. The protagonist, Erica, is one of a few girls who is down with TKO in part due to her natural skill with a video camera and her ability to make art out of the attacks. Greg's graphic novel about urban violence Yummy won a Coretta Scott King honor in 2011.
Creators
G. Neri is the author of the middle-grade books Ghetto Cowboy, Yummy and Chess Rumble, plus the young adult novel Surf Mules. He writes provocative, edgy stories for reluctant readers, especially urban boys, in hopes that these kinds of books-immediate, compelling and told through the eyes of young males-will open minds to reading.