It's a coming of age novel that suffers under the expectation of Parker's first book, Once a Runner.
No one writes running better and Parker's prose somehow convinced my couch bound ass that running was something I might like, that it's the most natural thing in the world. It's weighted with that expectation I came to the book that is essentially the prequel to Once a Runner. What I got instead was a melange of other stories.
We get sun soaked nostalgia; recollections of growing up in South Florida, a highschool basketball drama and, inexplicably, a murder mystery with all the nuance of Scooby Doo as written by Carl Hiaasen. Each on its own are pretty good. Parker does a great job of making even basketball interesting. But together it seems like he's trying to tell too many stories, shoves much of the running I came for to the back, and resolves everything with the pat ending you'd expect.
