CHOPPY SOCKY BLUES

Fourteen-year-old Jason Smallfield comes to understand that things are not always as they seem in a coming-of-age novel that packs a punch. Jason’s father is a well-known movie stuntman, an expert in all things “choppy socky”—karate, defenestration and other fighting skills. Trevor Smallfield, according to Jason, is a man who lied, cheated and deserted his family, and Jason has never forgiven him, but the protagonist comes to realize that his parents, friends and Tinga, the girl he’s falling in love with, aren’t always what they seem. Could this be true of his father as well? Though everything Jason knows about girls comes from porn magazines, his relationship with a real girl named Tinga is appropriately sweet, restrained and tentative, and his growing understanding of the people in his world is subtly evoked. In a field of fine coming-of-age novels for girls, here’s one that boys will get a kick out of. (Fiction. 12 & up)