SIXTEEN MINUTES

One game. One bench. One kid waiting to get on.

Kip Mallory is twelve years old, he wears number 16, and he has played zero minutes this season. Eleven games, zero minutes. In eleven days his family moves to Corbin Falls, which makes today the last game he will ever play for this team - if he plays at all.

Today is a knockout. Win and Cutter Street go to the district tournament in October. Lose and the season is over this afternoon, on a hot field at the fairgrounds with a scoreboard that has been broken for three years.

Three substitutions are allowed. There are four kids on the bench.

THE WHOLE BOOK IS ONE GAME

SIXTEEN MINUTES starts at 10:41 in the morning and ends at 4:02 in the afternoon, and it does not go anywhere else. Every chapter is stamped with the clock:

11:04 a.m. - 11:34 a.m. - 1st minute - 12th minute - 34th minute - 41st minute - 60th minute - 74th minute

Fifty chapters. Most of them are two or three pages. You always know exactly how much time is left, and so does Kip, because he counts.

He spends most of the book sitting down. That is the point. The tension is the sub board, and the coach who calls every kid by their full name, and the moment in the thirty-eighth minute when he is told to go warm up, and the moment in the forty-first when he is told to sit back down and nobody explains why.

Something happened in March. Kip walked off a field in the middle of a game and went and sat in the car. He has not told anybody why, and he is not going to tell you until the sixty-sixth minute.

WHAT'S INSIDE

- 50 very short chapters, told minute by minute in first person, present tense

- A game roster printed at the front - number, name, age, position - so you never lose track of who is who

- A full scoresheet printed at the back, with every goal, every substitution, and every penalty kick

- Fast enough for a reader who does not finish books, and honest enough for one who does

- Ages 9-13. Clean language. Real conflict. Nobody is cruel for sport

- One complete story that ends. No cliffhanger, no "book two"

FAIR WARNING

Cutter Street do not win the trophy in the last chapter. This is a story about a kid getting back onto a field, not about a comeback, and the ending is earned rather than announced.