Center for Teaching & Learning

I am reviewing Raiders Night by Robert Lypsyte. It’s a sports book about a boy named Matt whose life centers around football. Outside of school, everyone treats the football team like kings, but the team isn’t perfect. Almost all of them do steroids and some of the less-skilled team members get beat up by the better ones.
The main character, Matt, is the captain of the team and when a new kid comes to the team and shows off, most of the other players hate him and brutally assault him in the locker room. Matt likes him but doesn’t tell the team that he has become friends with him and is hanging out with Chris outside of school.
This book is about choosing your own path and making moral choices along with all the typical teen problems like breaking up with girl friends, being part of a family, and being nice to a younger brother.
I rated this book a ten out of ten because it balanced sports and his life events but still had enough action to hold my interest.  Instead of thinking only about football like some other main characters in sports books, Matt thought like a normal teenage boy with other problems to deal with. Some of the action was not just sports action, but with guns and fist fights, like when they fight in the locker rooms.
This book is definitely for older readers, thirteen and up because there is a lot of swearing and violence.
Patrick
Publisher:  HarperTeen, 256 pages