Saturday Night Dirt

I was pleasantly surprised by Saturday Night Dirt by Will Weaver. I'm by no means a racing fan, but he actually got me thinking that I could actually enjoy watching dirt-track racing or enjoy being on one of crew or drivers. His book was also fabulous in the fact that I felt like this was actually possibly since there were female drivers and the main character- if there was actually one main character- was the track manager, a teenager named Mel (Melody Walters).

The story follows a handful of drivers- both young and older. The young track manager Melody is trying to help her father, who is now bound to a wheelchair, salvage a deteriorating dirt racetrack. Mel and her dad are on a limited budget and they have limited time before the Saturday night racing begins. There's a significant threat of thunderstorms, but the Walters aren't willing to waste an opportunity to save their business and get in some racing.

The story also follows a young driver named Trace Bonham, who is currently at odds with his mechanic. Another young driver Beau Kim adds the perspective of a young driver trying to scrap together any parts he can, with the help of his young crew members, to even compete alongside drivers with sponsors.

LOLling: Son of the Mob

I had been looking for some non-girly books and wasn't disappointed with Son of the Mob by Gordon Korman. I read his book Born to Rock earlier this summer and got a kick out of it, so I figured I was ready for S.o.t.M.

Did I enjoy it? Definitely. And, I think I read it in a record 3 days (even with teaching & grading full time!), which is probably a record for me. The last book I probably read as quickly was The Beach, by Alex Garland (which will be a whole blog in itself at some point).

Aside from wanting to see if Korman do amuse me again, I was intrigued by the book because a few of my colleagues have used the book with their predominantly male classes (where I teach it's not uncommon to have one-gender classes because the students are sometimes separated according to which occupation they're pursuing, such as Cosmetology or Auto Body).

S.o.t.M. was an easy and fast read, which I needed. It involves a mob-boss's son, Vince. Vince has become the victim of his father's success. Vince tries desperately to do something, anything, without getting preferential treatment because of his father's business. He even joins the football team, figuring he can work his way into the popular crowd and meet some ladies, but he finds out that his father's influence instead insures that the opposing team avoids tackling Vince. One Vince catches on, he sees his only option as quitting the team--in order to end the madness.

With this guesture, Vince intrigues a school-newspaper girl named Kendra. Vince blows her off... but they end up running into one another later in the week at a college party. At the party, Vince pretends to be Kendra's boyfriend in order to free her from a frat-boy hanger-on. Somehow, the two end up making out and then inevitably a fist fight breaks out and pushes them different directions, unable to locate one-another again at the party. Vince is convinced it must have been a fluke, but he ends up meeting up with Kendra after school one day by offering her a ride to go pick up meds. to get rid of lice (Kendra works in a pre-school and managed to get it and pass it to Vince). From there, their love blooms over washing one another's hair with lice-b-gone treatments.

While everything seems hunky-dorey for the love birds, Vince finds out that Kenda is actually an FBI agent's daughter... and most likely one that's been listening to Vince's family on wire taps and bugs. Vince doesn't exactly offer up this info and he finds himself stuck in the middle of being Anthony Luca's son and Agent Blightly's daughter's new squeeze. Can we say Romeo and Juliet? The good news in that these two kids realize suicide is not the answer.

As Vince toils with his role as a son and boyfriend, he also gets sucked into helping out not-so-reputable characters by acting as a low-interest loan-shark. Vince hasn't exactly got the mob-boss intuition, particularly because his morals have a tendency to get the better of him and put him into a few tricky situations... which eventually comes to a head and also gets brought to Kendra's attention.