I'm giving this four stars for now, but I have an idea my opinion of it will creep up over time. I can't point to any obvious elements that make it so wonderful, or anything that particularly detracts. At its heart, it's a coming-of-age story (but it's about a boy, so it's billed as Bildungsroman) of a high-school boy dealing with grief after his entire track team is killed in a car accident. He deals by not dealing, really, losing himself to physicality (running), allowing speed to block out everything else. Kevin is not a reliable narrator; he doesn't remember much before the accident, and flashes only come to him in fits and starts, but not enough to piece together. He won't let anyone into his life, though even he doesn't seem to understand why. He's confused, frustrated, and generally out of sorts, and the writing captures his voice very well.

I wouldn't recommend it to everybody; it is very sports-heavy (track/running), and I'd imagine that could turn people off. But it did make me sort of wish that my knees could still handle running, and if that's not a sign of a good sports novel, I don't know what is. ( )

Main character just happens to not ride the school bus home from a track meet. Bus crashes and all perish. Story chronicles the years after the crash and its affect on the surviving team member. ( )

At last! a sports book for the intelligent boy. This was a great read about a young man who survives a tragic accident because he rode home with his parents and didn't ride the team van. His method of coping is to forget about the incident. The characters in his new school were somewhat stereotyped, but the story was good. ( )

One of the best of the books I've read for PPYA--gut-wrenching characterization of a boy whose world turned upside down when a team bus crashed. Funny, surreal, ferociously sad...

Why isn't this book better known? ( )

Kevin Schuler, the high school running star in "Life at These Speeds," has to be one of the most aloof first-person narrators I've ever experienced. While frustrating at times, this narrative technique forced me to experience the same nearly-maddening difficulty establishing an emotional connection with Kevin as do his friends and family in the novel. The result is a powerful depiction of a psychologically fractured adolescent's struggle to overcome a tragic experience and reawaken his dormant emotional core.

While running pervades this novel and the author clearly has an affinity for the sport, success on the track is not central to the conflict. Indeed, running becomes for Kevin the ultimate escape mechanism, through which he's able to while away his adolescent hours and achieve admiration among his peers while avoiding his repressed trauma. Kevin rarely, if ever, seems in jeopardy of failure on the track, as if the emotional trauma he has sustained is so brutal that he's become completely numbed to the discomfort associated with the intense training sessions and record-breaking performances that he ticks off with ease. This lack of emotion is effective in a literary sense, yet it renders the descriptions of training and racing somewhat hollow.

All in all, this is a strong novel with sufficient depth to satisfy the literary crowd and enough track and cross-country content to please readers of running fiction.

-Kevin Joseph, author of "The Champion Maker" ( )