Sweet Turnaround J
By Bill Whaley, Taos Daily Horse Fly
You’ll love Janey Holmes and her teammates in local author Peggy Beck’s basketball book. Beck’s fictional account of the polyglot Riverside Ravens, a hard-driving girls basketball team, is a fast and moving read. Janey guides the reader through a season of high drama, hopes dashed and revived.

In Peggy Beck’s novel, “Sweet Turnaround J,” the basketball team—composed of brown, black, white girls and their coach—struggle against a number of obstacles: adolescent infatuation, winter, getting passing grades, poverty, and patriarchal prejudice. The author told Horse Fly that she couldn’t find a basketball novel about girls, so she wrote one. Beck’s narrator Janey Holmes and her teammates, the tall and sexy dreamboat Latoya Watkins—or short and fiery Mickey Johnson, or the dead-eye Navajo Nia Beaulieu and the speedy but well-mannered New Mexican Alejo Lopez—all help the author jump-start a new genre.

As for the audience, this reviewer isn’t a teenage girl but found the novel a fast action-packed read. It is filled with insights, especially about how to train and play basketball. Coach Berro is a model of discipline and knowledge when it comes to turning a bunch of idiosyncratic teen-athletes into a team. Beck’s style—lots of dialogue, action, and a command of high school slang—adds to the realism.

The author also recreates the experience of growing up through high school and focuses on the importance of relationships among the girls, parents, and friends. The depiction of relationships is often missing in the male sports books, which focus more on narrative action. Beck’s portrayal of a multicultural team with all the signifiers suggests an observant eye and much research. Even as we hold our breath on behalf of the Riverside Ravens, due to their growing pains, we discover the important lessons and human strength that basketball or any sport can teach in the drive toward winning games and learning life’s lessons.

Like Janey Holmes says, “Nobody has given us any respect the whole season but we know we’re stellar.” And Peggy Beck has given girls and readers a stellar novel. “Sweet Turnaround J” is a good candidate for a high school English course or gift to inspire a young athlete. Bravo, Peggy! Good job.

She shoots! She scores!
By Andi Marquette "Tierra de - (Colorado)
For any woman who has ever played high school basketball, ever had her first heart-aching crush during those years, and ever struggled with family issues, the issues of her teammates, school problems, and team-gelling problems, this book is for you. And if you're a teen who plays high school sports and has to deal with everything that comes with that, including personal problems, internal and external dramas, then this book is for you, as well.

Full disclosure: I played high school basketball back in the day. I'm also a basketball fan, so when I read books that deal with basketball, I can tell if an author knows her stuff or not and PV Beck Knows. Her. Stuff.

Full disclosure two: I played high school basketball back in the day. I'm also a basketball fan, so when I read books that deal with basketball, I can tell if an author knows her stuff or not and PV Beck Knows. Her. Stuff.

Now, for the mechanics: Beck writes a tight, well-paced narrative with snappy, true-to-life dialogue, fully realized characters, and the angst that comes with the pressures of being an underdog team in an overdog world.

This is a book about basketball the game, yes, but it's also about basketball the culture, and how it can both pull people together and drive wedges between them. It's about how high school girls on the cusp of womanhood deal with responsibility, competition, heartache, growing up, personal problems, school struggles, and finding common ground with people they might never have thought they could.

For those of us who survived high school and a high school sport, this book brought all of that right back. I recognized myself in these characters, in the flaws, the friendships, the alienation, the secrets of the home life that you never showed at school but your best friend knew about, and the sense of being at odds with most adults and many of your fellow students. Beck captures that, and she also captures that sense of coming together, of finding the friends who do have your back, and finding the adults who do, as well.

Women's Basketball Fans
Will Love This Book!!
By Marge - (California)
I love women's basketball and love books about women's basketball. Sweet Turnaround J is in the spirit of In These Girls-Hope is a Muscle, The Same River Twice, and Counting Coup.

But it's more than just a book following All-State Janey Holmes' sophomore year at a new high school on a basketball team that hasn't won a game in three years. Beck paints a world that mixes a girl's obsession with basketball during those difficult middle teenage years with a fascinating and almost mystical weave of Latino, African American, and Native American cultures brought together in a group of girls who, just maybe, can learn to work together as a team--a winning team.

The author P.V. Beck is a former basketball coach, and her descriptions of the practices and the games carry a vividness and excitement that kept me glued to the pages. The interplay between the girls on the team is spot on--sometimes goofy, sometimes confrontational, sometimes poignant, but always entertaining. You really grow to love these girls and root for them as the season progresses.

Beck calls upon her academic interest in myth to give Sweet Turnaround J a subtle but deeper literary level. This creates a strong foundation for the recurring themes of Native American myth and a few literary tropes that form an overarching structure to the book. The writing style is fluid and her descriptions and language have a beauty that transcends yet enhances basketball as a real game and as a metaphor for the various life's issues and growing up the team goes through in a season.

The last game in the book is one of the best I've ever read. It's epic in a really, really good way. It made me giddy with delight, like I feel when I'm at a live game -- filled with gripping excitement and drama. Its twists and turns are realistic -- I've seen games as crazy as this one, where it comes down to little more than who wants the victory more.

Sweet Turnaround J is a must for women's basketball fans. I wish there were more books like it.