Book Review: Meet Me at Half Court, by Julie Spencer

Julie Spencer is an author of sweet romance ranging from teenage to adult. I think she writes other things as well, but that seems to be her focus right now. She likes to post some of her works in progress in her blogs as she writes, so that fans and other interested parties can get hooked read them.

I've been reading along and commenting on some of those, and she asked if I'd put up a review of Meet Me at Half Court.

The premise is simple. A tomboy high school girl with a genius for basketball and an eye for a college scholarship finds herself choosing between her old, good looking next-door-neighbor boyfriend from elementary school days with a bit of history, whose interests lie in something other than basketball, and an equally good looking new transfer student basketball player with an attitude and something of an excuse for it, and something in his garage that he probably doesn't want all the kids at school knowing he has. 

Let's see what else I can say without having to give a spoiler alert.

I find myself wishing Julie had been willing to draw the plot out a bit and give the story less of a binary ending. (I have friends who have been in the position of the less-favored boy, you see.)

I suspect it will be more interesting to middle grade girls than other audiences, generally speaking. There are a lot of fun scenes. The sports angle works, although it could have been worked harder if she had been willing to add chapters. There are some gooey romance scenes, but they stay appropriate for an audience not looking for steam.

Rating? Four of five, assuming the middle-grade audience.

I think I can also recommend it to Japanese high school students looking for something relatively safe and relatively simply and modern to build their English reading skills with. And for parents looking for something for their middle grade children to read.

Delicious!

The old conundrum, "Can delicious be good for you?" invokes a common paradox. Like all paradoxes, it is easily resolved by looking closely and context and semantic overload.

There are two kinds of delicious. (Just like there are two kinds of beautiful. Well, more than two in both cases, but I'm going to cast a really broad cloth today.)

One kind is easy-to-eat and easy-to-turn-into-energy, sugar being the most notorious representative.

The other kind is harder to pin down, because it varies from person to person and from time to time. If your taste recognition circuitry has not been totally burned out by an overload of sweets and meats, food that is truly good for you is usually perceived by you as delicious.

And if you think about it, you know the difference. One excites, inducing -- not coincidentally -- an excited, somewhat uncomfortable feeling in your stomach. The other tends to make you feel comfortable, when you smell it, when you eat it, and when you think about it.

Are there foods that are both kinds of delicious? Well, yes, of course. Most foods are a bit of both. Bill Cosby's chocolate cake routine speaks to that somewhat poignantly.

Work is a bit like food, too.

So, what am I trying to say here? Next time you wonder whether you should go on a weight-control diet, think about how you've defined delicious in your conscious mind.

Think about the foods that are supposed to be good for you. Among those, you'll recognize foods that you enjoy eating, or foods that you kind of really would like to eat now, even though they aren't the most popular foods. Those foods will provide clues to what your body is really needing. Give your body the food it really needs, and you won't find yourself nearly as subject to the uncontrollable cravings that make your diet go haywire.

If you get into the habit of figuring out what your body really needs and eating that first, you'll general find that you don't really need to think that much about weight control. Your body will naturally gravitate to the healthy weight range.

Exercise also helps, of course. And the same principle operates here, too. There are kinds of exercise that seem exciting, others that seem easy, and those that you actually enjoy. Do the exercises that you can enjoy at some level, and you will find that your health improves naturally. Not without effort, but naturally.

I mentioned that work is similar, so is study.