At the start of the 2016-2017 school year, Chicago Bears fan Kareem (Syrian American) aspires to be a star quarterback but underperforms at middle school tryouts and doesn’t make the team. When Austin, the quarterback and coach’s son, offers to help Kareem get on the team in spring if Kareem does Austin’s school assignments, Kareem reluctantly agrees. Austin is an unlikable bully, but Kareem feels an immediate camaraderie with new student Fadi, a Syrian. But when Austin targets Fadi with racist bullying, Kareem doesn’t speak out to support his new friend. The personal and political collide when Kareem gets into a fight with Austin and his attempt to hide it leads to his dad’s delay in booking flights for his mom and grandparents. His mom had traveled to Syria to bring her parents, including Kareem’s ailing grandfather, to the United States. They are stuck overseas when the Trump Administration’s 2017 executive order banning immigrants from seven countries with significant Muslim populations is announced. Kareem feels responsible, and deeply guilty when his grandfather dies before the ban is lifted and his mother, with his grandmother, safely returns. Football metaphors are a unifying element across this novel-in-verse that makes the impact of Islamophobia achingly personal and vivid through Kareem’s story.

This award-winning, heartfelt coming-of-age novel in verse tells the powerful story of a seventh-grade Syrian American boy and his struggles, big and small, as he navigates middle school.

"The exact type of book I would've loved, and needed, as a kid." —Jasmine Warga, New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Honor recipient for Other Words for Home

Seventh grade begins, and Kareem’s already fumbled it.

His best friend moved away, he messed up his tryout for the football team, and because of his heritage, he was voluntold to show the new kid—a Syrian refugee with a thick and embarrassing accent—around school. Just when Kareem thinks his middle school life has imploded, the hotshot QB promises to get Kareem another tryout for the squad. There’s a catch: to secure that chance, Kareem must do something he knows is wrong.

Then, like a surprise blitz, Kareem’s mom returns to Syria to help her family but can’t make it back home. If Kareem could throw a penalty flag on the fouls of his school and home life, it would be for unnecessary roughness.

Kareem is stuck between. Between countries. Between friends, between football, between parents—and between right and wrong. It’s up to him to step up, find his confidence, and navigate the beauty and hope found somewhere in the middle.

** Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature** Global Read Aloud Selection ** School Library Journal Best Middle Grade Book ** Chicago Public Library Best Fiction for Older Readers ** PEOPLE Magazine Best Kids Book ** Junior Library Guild Selection** Texas Lone Star Reading List selection ** Common Sense Media Selection for Families** Cybils Novel in Verse Award Winner** Jane Addams Children Book Award Finalist** ILA Notable Book for a Global Society