This is a weekly meme hosted by Wandering Words, where you give the first few lines of a book to hook your readers before introducing the book.

Here are my first lines:

“In December of 1984, when Raina and I were sophomores, my high school held its first and last annual girls’ winter basketball tournament, the Inglewood Christmas Classic.  The next year, an hour before the first-round games were set to start, a light fixture fell from the ceiling and left a six-foot hole in the floor, and the indignity of having to cancel the tournament once convinced my coach we shouldn’t host it anymore.”

Read on to find out which book this extract is from…

And the book is… The Necessary Hunger by Nina Revoyr.

GOODREADS SYNOPSIS:

As a star basketball player in her senior year of high school, Nancy Takahiro’s life is about to change forever. Faced with the college recruitment process and unsure where her skill will take her, Nancy is not prepared for meeting Raina Webber, an all-state shooting guard whose passion for basketball is matched only by her talent for it.

When Nancy’s father and Raina’s mother fall in love and decide to move in together, the girls are faced with the challenge of negotiating their already intense rivalry and friendship–and of living with the scrutiny of neighbors who react with varying degrees of comfort to their Japanese American and African American household.

The Necessary Hunger follows Nancy, Raina, and several of their friends through their last year of high school. For some of them, their senior year will be full of glory, and the anticipation of college. For others, however, stranded in an inner-city Los Angeles neighborhood that promises little in the way of opportunity, it will mark not only the end of their time in school but also the end of their hope.

As Nancy and Raina both prepare to leave the urban neighborhood that has nurtured them, they find themselves looking toward a future that is no longer easily defined. The Necessary Hunger is about families, friendship, racial identity, and young people who are nearing adulthood in a dangerous and challenging world. It is about sports as a means of salvation, about the nature of competition, and ultimately about the various kinds of love. 

Let me know if you have read The Necessary Hunger.  Yay or nay?