Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"If I had a gun for every ace I have drawn
I could arm a town the size of Abilene"
-- The Grateful Dead, "Loser"

"Pocket aces. Shushie dealt me two aces: a club and a diamond. It's the best starting hand possible. Not often do cards like that come along -- once in 221 hands to be exact. In five hours of playing, it's my first pocket aces and probably my only one for the tournament.
"I stare at my cards and try to be ice. Every fiber in me wants to smile, to jump up and down, to point my fingers in the air and wiggle my knees back and forth like a showboating wide receiver after a touchdown. But poker isn't about grandstanding; it's about patient, it's about cool. And it's about money -- lots of it."

Sixteen-year-old high school student Andrew Lang is a math whiz who has no experience with girls (despite having developed a Guy Meets Girl Algorithm), no chemical addictions, and -- to his father's chagrin -- no letter jacket. He has a cute little brother named Rooster, and a serious dislike of Herman Melville. Andrew works in his father's dry-cleaning business after school and on weekends, alongside his fellow student, the older, hot Goth girl Jasmine. But there is probably a better chance of my being dealt five aces out of a single deck than there is of Andrew ever deciding that he wants to become the third-generation owner of the family dry-cleaning establishment.

Unbeknownst to his parents, Jasmine, or his best friend Scott, Andrew has been frequenting the illegal poker club that operates in the basement of the town's seedy pool hall. Over the course of the past year his success at the poker table had first waxed brightly but has now seriously waned. As the result of his compulsion to reignite his winning ways, Andrew has "borrowed" five-hundred dollars from the dry-cleaning register in order to enter a No-Limit Hold 'Em tournament. But one bad hand costs him that tournament and now the time is quickly tick-tick-ticking down toward the day when his father will balance the books and discover that the money is missing. Borrowing another hundred in his desperation to play his way back to profitability has just gotten Andrew another hundred dollars further in the hole. What is his next move?

"I'll see you, I'll call you, I'll raise you
But it's no cheap thrill
It will cost you, cost you, cost you
Anything you have to pay."
-- Suzanne Vega, "No Cheap Thrill"

BIG SLICK is an action-filled tale involving hot girls, hot cars, very dangerous people, serious desperation, and some seriously bad choices. The poker scenes are so engaging that I had to spend some quality hours signed into Yahoo games learning how to play Hold 'Em. (In trying to follow Andrew's advice on how to play the game, I've already tripled my initial Yahoo play money.) Being a numbers person myself, I like Andrew's penchant for tossing out percentages. I also enjoyed the author's naming the many chapter titles after the slang terms for different combinations of starting hands, such as Pocket Rockets (two aces), Hilton Sisters (two queens), Maxwell Smart (an eight and a six), and Gold Rush (a four and a nine).

(I just learned from checking out "Loser" in David Dodd's exquisite COMPLETE ANNOTATED GRATEFUL DEAD LYRICS that Dead Man's Hand -- an ace and an eight -- comes from Wild Bill Hickok having been holding aces and eights when he was shot to death in Deadwood.)

I couldn't stop reading the book as Andrew Lang sinks deeper and deeper into that proverbial hole of his own making. With the action and danger -- and the enigmatic Goth girl -- I'm betting that BIG SLICK is going to be both extremely popular and a great new title for reluctant readers.

Richie Partington
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