Cover-Up : : Mystery at the Super Bowl

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Fledgling fourteen-year-old sports reporters Susan Carol and Stevie investigate suspicious activities at the Super Bowl after Stevie gets fired from his co-anchor job on a ground-breaking teen sports show.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

only the last 50 pages have good pacing submitted by camelsamba on June 16, 2012, 10:29pm The last 40 or 50 pages was quite engaging, but the first 200+ were quite a slog!

This series of teen mysteries by John Feinstein was recommended for sports-mad teens. I got them for my 6th grade son, but then his 3rd grade brother wanted me to read one aloud at bedtime. He eventually got bored with it and had me stop (so I finished it on my own time).

The writing style is really not very good - perhaps it's more journalistic than novelistic? Feinstein is known for his sports journalism. Whatever, it's definitely not real-aloud-istic! There are untold details that don't advance the plot at all. There is all sorts of name-dropping that will only serve to date the book. I don't follow sports closely enough to know if the names of the Ravens were real players, or made up like the ones on the invented California Dream. Same with many of the people affiliated with the real media sources. But maybe that kind of thing appeals to sports-mad teens, I dunno.

The basis for this series is two teenagers (a boy and a girl) who won a sportswriting competition, earning them a trip to the Final Four (3 books earlier than this one), where they started on the road to fame and mild fortune because of their talents. I don't mind that notion so much - after all, if you can have sports or music prodigies, why not writing prodigies? In this book, you encounter paragraphs that totally give away the plots of the previous books (I would edit them on the fly, in case my son wanted to read the earlier books). Stevie and Susan Carol ("SC" forthwith) (try saying "Susan Carol" every other sentence when you read aloud, it gets tiring!) have ended up with a TV contract, and this earned them a trip to the Super Bowl (without parents), but then the network has issues with Stevie. However, he still gets to go to the Super Bowl because of a newspaper contact (who tried to talk him out of accepting the TV contract in the first place). Stevie is jealous of SC's new partner, so some mild teen angst and romance ensues relative to that, but it's pretty mild (boring to an 8yo, though). Oh, and then they stumble upon a steroids cover-up involving one of the teams in the Super Bowl, due to a team doctor who leers at and tries to come on to SC during a party (that was awkward to read to an 8yo and led to more on-the-fly editing). Will their budding romance and their budding careers survive the fall-out as they challenge the powerful sports and media elite? Read the last 50 pages to find out - the first 200 will likely bore you...