Front Desk 4 – Key Player

Kelly Yang's Key Player is a big-hearted school and family story for 10 year olds about a girl who would much rather write than kick a football.

What happens

Mia Tang is a brilliant writer. She has a column in a student newspaper in China and runs the school paper with her friend Da-Shawn. What she can't do is PE.

Los Angeles is hosting this year's Women's World Cup, and her PE teacher has started a football unit. Mia spends most of it keeping well away from the ball (once with a Baby-Sitters Club book tucked into her shorts). So Mia ends up with a C. And that C could cost her a place at the journalism camp in San Francisco that she's desperate to go to.

Her plan is very Mia. What if she wrote a World Cup story so good that it changed her teacher's mind? Better still, what if she got an interview with one of the teams? The trouble is, nobody seems to know which hotel they're hiding in.

Meanwhile there's plenty happening at the Calivista Motel, where Mia's family lives and works. Her parents are saving to buy their first house (Mum really, REALLY wants a kitchen island). Her best friend Lupe is on a maths team with a coach who never turns up. And Hank is hoping a posh restaurant will take his famous burgers nationwide.

Everything is told by Mia, so you get all her worries and all her big dreams straight from her. The quiet moments land hardest. A school counsellor calls her a "homework robot" and says great leaders are good at sports, and Mia starts to wonder whether she's American enough. It's a very real feeling for any child who doesn't quite fit the mould.

Have you got a reader who'd rather be curled up with a book than out on the pitch? They'll be cheering Mia on.

It's the fourth of Kelly Yang's books about Mia. You can start here, though there's a lot of history between the characters. Mia and Lupe also chat about crushes and changing bodies once or twice, which some parents will want to know for this shelf.

What to read next

If they're new to Mia, it's well worth going back to Front Desk, the book where her family first comes to the little motel called the Calivista.