Losers Take All: A Novel

by David Klass

Overview

At Jack Logan's sports-crazy New Jersey high school, the new rule is that all kids must play on a team. So Jack and a ragtag group of anti-athletic friends decide to get even. They are going to start a rebel JV soccer team whose mission is to avoid victory at any cost, setting out to secretly undermine the jock culture of the school. But as the team's losing formula becomes increasingly successful at attracting fans and attention, Jack and his teammates are winning in ways they never expected—and don't know how to handle.

Losers Take All by David Klass is a fresh and funny novel that throws out all the rules of high school sports. After all, if you can't win the game, change the rules.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250090591
Publisher:	Square Fish
Publication date:	12/20/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	890L (what's this?)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

David Klass is the author of many young adult novels, including You Don't Know Me, Losers Take All, and Grandmaster. He is also a Hollywood screenwriter, having written more than twenty-five action screenplays, including Kiss the Girls, starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd, Walking Tall, starring The Rock, and Desperate Measures, starring Michael Keaton and Andy Garcia. Klass grew up in a family that loved literature and theater-his parents were both college professors and writers-but he was a reluctant reader, preferring sports to books. But he started loving the adventure stories his parents would bring home from the library-particularly Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas. After his sister twice won a story contest in Seventeen magazine, Klass decided he would win it too, and when he was a senior in high school, he did, publishing his first story, "Ringtoss," in the magazine. He studied at Yale University, where he won the Veech Award for Best Imaginative Writing. He taught English in Japan, and wrote his first novel, The Atami Dragons, about that experience. He now lives in New York with his wife and two children.

Editorial Reviews

Klass creates an uproarious soccer spectacle that's fun to imagine, but it's the message behind this underdog team, one of acceptance and forgiveness, that will stick with readers after the Losers play their final heroic game.” —Publishers Weekly

“The depiction of jock culture at 'Muscles' High is disturbingly accurate, and Jack's and Becca's familial struggles are well-played. There is a lot to like here: humor, social commentary, and what it means to be a winner.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2015-07-15
When a football coach-turned-principal enforces a new policy requiring every senior to join an athletic team, a group of self-professed geeks, oddballs, and other nonathletes creates a team that challenges the high school's long-standing sports culture. Seventeen-year-old Jack Logan's father and older brothers are local football legends, but he has no interest in becoming an elite athlete. When "Becca the Brain" suggests fielding a soccer team, he is initially reluctant, but Becca's plan is more about having fun than winning. Together they manage to find enough like-minded students to fill the roster, but with a goalie who falls asleep midgame and a player who speaks only in non sequiturs, they are an eclectic bunch. Their first game is a dismal failure, earning them a dressing-down from the principal and, oddly enough, a huge Internet following. The Losers touch a nerve, driving some to raucous enthusiasm and others to violence. The depiction of jock culture at "Muscles" High is disturbingly accurate, and Jack's and Becca's familial struggles are well-played. There is a lot to like here: humor, social commentary, and what it means to be a winner. But the too-easy ending feels rushed and false. A victory, if of the minor sort. (Fiction. 12-16)

Kirkus Reviews