DUKE & THE LONELY BOY

A teenage jock and a solitary outsider undergo profound changes when their lives unexpectedly converge in this debut YA novel.

Failing his pre-calculus class, high school football star Duke is assigned a tutor: brainy loner Tommy, whose shadowlike existence on campus barely registers with his peers. Duke is uncomfortable with Tommy’s extreme reserve but impressed with his ability to make what the athlete needs to learn understandable, especially when his grades soar. But this poignant tale doesn’t trace a predictable or sugarcoated path to a friendship between opposites. Duke, who has witnessed his cousin traumatized by violence, intuits that beneath Tommy’s reserve is “a meteor shower of sorrow.” Langan’s well-defined first-person narratives, switching between Tommy and Duke, reveal very different lives. Tommy’s painful story shifts back and forth in time, relating horrific childhood experiences with his drug-taking mother—unsparingly realistic and difficult to read—that scarred him, sparking feelings of guilt, anger, and loss. The book also recounts his rescue by loving grandparents and how bewilderment and a sense of betrayal closed him down emotionally after his abrupt loss of contact with his sole childhood friend, Roxy. The girl’s compassion and high spirits hid her own painful secret. Duke’s present-day narrative, meanwhile, encompasses a stable family, his passion for football, and his aching turmoil over how he lets his cheerleader girlfriend, Kristy, mess with his head. She insists that they pretend not to be involved at school so her dad won’t find out, seemingly not because Duke is a Black student and she is White. The reason is her religious fanatic father insists that she date someone of their faith. Duke’s distinctive voice reveals a 17-year-old gradually cultivating self-reflection and self-respect, influenced by his connection with Tommy and by the value he discovers in his growing friendship based on mutual respect with a girl named Charlie. (Their lively verbal interactions enjoyably leaven the tale’s emotional intensity.) Tommy’s realization that “I’m still that little boy afraid of what the world would take from him” is the beginning of his own ability to move on. Although a shocking event precludes a traditional, happily-ever-after conclusion, the story ends on a touching ray of hope.

An effective, often moving tale of teen angst, heartache, betrayal, friendship, and self-discovery.