I am very bad at sports.  I am the last person you want on your team.  I drop things.  I stand in the outfield and stare up at the sun.  I only have hand-eye coordination when I’m holding a video game controller.  Given this fact, it may not come as much of surprise to you when I say that I don’t like sports.  I don’t like watching them on tv, I don’t like watching them in real life, and I am definitely not interested in reading about them.

A good writer, though, can write about something that you loathe, something that you’re bored to tears by, or even something that scares the pants right off of you, and you can’t stop reading.  Catherine Murdock is such a writer, and in the same way that the cancelled-too-soon show Sports Night did, she tells a story that has sports in it that’s ultimately not about sports.  It doesn’t matter that I can’t tell a point guard from….another type of person on the court.  It doesn’t matter that I’ve never milked a cow.  It definitely doesn’t matter that I never had two guys in high school vying for my affections.  What does matter is that D.J. Schwenk is a character that you care about, and you root for her in all ways:  for her broken-yet-healing family, for her friendships with popular and unpopular alike, for her future at university, and for her future with the right person.

FRONT AND CENTER is the conclusion to the D.J. trilogy, and Murdock does an excellent job at weaving the many threads of this story together.  There is something very warm and comforting about the Schwenk farm, and even when D.J. is at her lowest, it’s easy to see how she can draw strength from her family.  They’re not perfect people, but they forgive each other’s faults, and it’s wonderful to see how their Red Bend community rallies around them after the difficult events of OFF SEASON.  The old adage from writing classes in college is that good stories are about how a character changes, and D.J. truly does, becoming a little braver and a little more steady as the book goes on.  D.J. balances a lot of strong personalities in her life, from Beaner to Brian to Amber to Win, and she has to find ways to love all these people and yet not give away too much of herself in the process.  She is standing right on the line between teenager and grownup, and oh, that is a tough place to be.

Though the Schwenk family at large carries its share of scars,  Murdock brings the funny at the right places:  the Italian dinner with the “meatballi” scene is a scream, and the story of D.J.’s mom’s prom shoe disaster makes every pair of awful dress shoes I’ve worn seem slightly less awful. As the trilogy comes to an end, we know a little bit of what D.J.’s future plans are going to be, but more importantly, we know that in her struggle to be a better daughter, to be a truer friend, to become the woman she is meant to be, she’s headed in the right direction.

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