STRONG LIKE YOU

Poverty and father worship lead an Arkansas teenager into dangerous choices and situations.

Ignoring plenty of signs that his missing father was not the best role model, Walker struggles to emulate his dad’s facade of toughness, both on and off the high school football field that he and Sawyer, his tight buddy and cousin, brutally patrol. Even as the prospect of being turned out of their house looms, and his new coach spends more and more time with Walker’s abandoned, penniless mom, the sophomore resolves to track his errant father down and fetch him back to set things right. But the trail quickly leads through an ugly tangle of drugs, drinking, and criminal acts to a shocking revelation, followed by gun violence. Walker’s emotional instability, the small-town setting’s poverty, and the descriptions of families in crisis all lend the tale a harsh cast overall. But at the urging of a patient school guidance counselor, Walker discovers the power of poetry to articulate his feelings and also finds in his coach a steadier father figure. The book explores masculinity, with Walker having a heartening insight near the end, when he realizes that with the right help, people can learn better than they were taught. (The lucky ones, anyway.) The coach draws comment for being Black; other major characters seem to be white.

A grim but not entirely hopeless picture of life in the Ozarks, threaded with tragedies both immediate and endemic.