Cochran's first novel puts a fresh angle on a familiar story: Rival
high-school football teams square off for the state championship.
Instead of putting readers on the field, though, Cochran takes them
inside one player's head for a full day's mental preparation,
rituals, flashbacks, and general ruminations. Senior Travis Cody,
raised in a Louisiana town so obsessed with the sport that every
boy gets a toy football at birth, looks with mixed feelings at what
will most likely be his final game. He is eager to face the team
that handed the Oil Camp Roughnecks its only defeat in the regular
season, but all the backslapping and boosterism is beginning to
wear thin, and the once-remote prospect of life after football is
upon him. Rising before dawn on game day, Travis mulls over the
personalities and personal influences of nearly everyone he knows,
recapping the history of his dying oil town, college plans,
football's pleasures, pains, and character-building aspects, and
other topics. With an artfully suspenseful set of pre-game
preparations, the stage is set, but the characters remain stuck in
prescribed, limited roles; Travis occasionally sounds more like an
adult looking back than a teenager looking ahead. Cochran primes
readers for an explosive contest, then pulls out the rug by ending
the story after one play - closure on an intellectual level, but
not an emotional one. Despite the unevenness, this is a promising
debut: thematically complex, strongly written. (Kirkus Reviews)
Once in a while you get a second chance. For Travis Cody this is
one of those times. His team, the Oil Camp Roughnecks, is facing
the Pineview Pelicans for the state championship. Travis will have
forty-eight minutes head-to-head with rival Jericho Grooms.
Forty-eight minutes to redeem himself for letting Grooms break him
on the play that cost the Roughnecks an undefeated season.
Forty-eight minutes to prove he isn't a quitter.
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