'Play' is a complex and challenging YA novel about growing up, masculinity, and the different types of games that teenage boys play. Alternately narrated by Matt, Mark, Luc and Johnny, the novel follows the four boys from the start of Year 8 through to Year 11.

Including four main characters enables Luke Palmer to explore a wide variety of different issues facing teenagers today: Johnny's academic and behavioural struggles in school despite his bright, inquisitive nature; the toxic masculinity exhibited by Luc's father and the way that this influences Luc's own self-esteem and his interactions with the opposite sex; Matt's growing awareness of being gay and his uncertainty about how his friends will view this; and Mark's increasing involvement with drug dealing and the danger in which this places him, We get to see both these characters' own and each other's perspectives on these challenges, and Palmer shows an acute understanding of the pressures and pleasures of teenage boyhood. As the novel's title suggests, characters are often playing 'games' of one sort or another, but some turn out to have much higher stakes.

This is a well-written and increasingly gripping novel which takes its characters seriously. Like Palmer's previous novel 'Grow', it is a powerful and important read for both adults and teenagers. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

I loved Grow, the previous book by Luke Palmer, and he did it again! His four Evangelists are beautifully lyrical, full of raw emotions. Each one is dealing with their own issues: homosexuality, parental pressure (to the point of violence and toxic masculinity), drugs. And of course there's Johnny, special and aloof (with such a remarkable ending!).
We love them, we cry with them. and when play becomes real life, we with grow with them.

A gripping tale of four friends and their very real struggles as they navigate their worlds.
Various themes run through the book including drug trafficking, LGBTQ, poverty, environmental issues but they are not laboured.
Written in turn from the perspectives of the boys. The reader experiences emotional highs and lows. The format also allows the reader to relate directly to each character. The different perspectives also give the characters a roundedness.
It took a while to get used to the timelines as narratives overlap and jump forward in time. However, this did not detract from a desire to continue on the journeys of discovery with the characters.
Reading it bought to mind Junk by Melvin Burgess but for young adults of today.

Unfortunately, the writing was not compelling enough for me. I was really intrigued by the blurb and the idea of following male protagonists but I found myself checking out early on while reading.

4 boys who end up with lives that interweave and join them together forever. I flitted between which was my favourite character each time it was their chapter! Luc is just trying to please his dad. Matt is working out who he is and what he wants. Johnny is a ball of energy but understands the boys more than they realise. Then there's Mark. He made mistakes, but did he know what he was doing? Is the ending his fault? Did he mean for it all to happen? No. He was just a boy caught up in a bad adult world with no-one looking out for him. This book is thought-provoking and hard-hitting and I loved it.

Matthew, Luc, Johnny and Mark are growing up together. They pass the times until they can leave school, and their small town, by playing games, scoring points against each other.
But the more they grow, the more the rules of the games, and the games tehmselves, change into something darker and much more dangerous. What happens then when you break the rules? And can they all finish the game before someone loses the ultimate battle?

'Play' is an extraordinary well told story but also crushingly heartbreaking. It starts with them buidling dens high in the trees, only to bring them down, the four friends tumbling to the ground in their buidling with an exhilararing rush. But as the rules of play change, the reader can only witness how the boys hurtle faster and faster towards... What? It becomes clearer and clearer as the story progresses, jumping from the voice on one boy to another (the book is told in the voices of the four boys). And there is nothing we can do to stop them and it's truly, heartwrenchingly sad. It's probably very different reading Play as a mother rather than its inteded readership! but it really shook me. Talking of being a mother, parents in Play are either absent, helpless or downright nasty, which adds to the sense of foreboding.
The book is excessively well written and although - I found - full of sadness for today's youth, I also felt it was a very keen observation of how some children grow up with, ultimately, a spark of hope in how things can turn (in cleverly done glimspes in each of the boy's possible futures).
Definitely a must-read.

Matthew, Mark, Luc and Johnny (I only realised the biblical connotations when I wrote that down) are four friends and ‘Play’ is their story told from each of their four perspectives.

Matthew is an artist and has a secret that his friends have guessed but not all of them have accepted. Mark’s family is poor and he’s vulnerable to his older brother’s aquaintances when they start paying him for small favours that escalate into something more dangerous. Luc is a gifted athlete but his dad is a bully and pushes him too hard. Johnny is wild, destructive and brilliant but is neglected by his parents.

The opening line of the book is: “Everyone’s setting their socks on fire.” And this is just one of the games that the boys play. The story spans several years, from their more innocent games - building dens and then tearing them down in the summer following Year 7, to the riskier games the boys engage in as they enter Year 9. By the end of the book the wilderness where they built dens as children has become a landfill dump and their new games have a disastrous consequence.

The ending is truly transcendent as, during a watershed moment, the characters meditate on all the possible futures they could have, depending on the choices that they make—one final game.

What I loved about this book is that these four boys are not heroes or underdogs - they’re four ordinary boys from working class families, in a small town, dealing with their own battles in their own way and with the support of each other.

The author is a secondary school teacher and this is very apparent in his astute and empathetic portrayal of these formative years.

‘Play’ is an incredibly authentic and deeply moving coming-of-age story about boys’ friendship, choices and consequences. Highly recommended for children aged 13+.

I love books that are quiet and unassuming, all until you open the cover and then they pack the biggest punch! Play is an absolute treasure of a book that deserves to be read as widely as possible

I thoroughly enjoyed Luke Palmer's debut novel Grow from last years UKLA reading. His characters were well developed and drawn and narratively the story was tense and well crafted. A little reliant on coincidence but a breathtaking read with strong messages for young men in schools.
Well, he has topped himself with Play, which takes place in the same world as Grow but several years later. His young Year 7/8 characters make reference to the story of the biology teacher at the heart of Grow.
This time, Palmer uses four perspectives to tell the story of four male friends growing from Year 8-Year 11. The book opens when Mark, who's escaping the miserable life at home with his angry older brother and hardworking, though tired, single mum, is building a den in the copse between the houses and the school fields. It's the summer holidays and he meets a new kid Johnny who is as wacky as he is loud. But a firm friendship is formed and when school starts again Johnny joins Mark and his friends Matt and Luc. We follow the boys up to their Year 11 year from dens and hijinks to GCSEs and relationships.
Hearing from all four characters, via their own voices and perspectives, creates a robust exploration of boys turning into young men and the stresses they face. The boys aren't particularly all likeable and in fact some of their actions are positively abhorrent. But the internal reflection feels raw and authentic making this a great story to share with older students - perhaps in a PSHE or social curriculum. Many of the descriptions of events come from more than one perspective and enable a consideration of the impacts of the boys' choices. They would make excellent discussion prompts, for example.
An absolute winner of a novel. I read it in one day and was riveted until the end.
A strong recommendation from me.

Four teenagers growing up together. The careful knitted prose highlights both their differences and the pull that keeps them together.
Palmer's decision to write from alternating perspectives give edge to the narrative, and heightens the pace and tension at key moments in the book - particularly as it races to its hearth-thumping conclusion.
A fast-paced, tightly-written, thought-provoking journey. YA at its best.

An extraordinary book! That ending! I'm still thinking about it. At times funny, at times heart-wrenching, a beautiful exploration of masculinity, sexuality, friendship, county lines and the painfully irresistible downward spirals of life. I've never read anything like it. It's YA at its very best and we're lucky to live in a world where readers have books like this one. It's a book that will make you feel ALL the things, it'll make you think, and it will stay with you for a long, long time.

I was absolutely blown away by this book- by the complexity of the characters, the mixture of humour and pathos and the incredible, unforgettable ending. As a school librarian, I know that we need more books about male friendships and the challenges our boys are facing. and I will be recommending this book enthusiastically to the pupils at our school.

Play follows the lives of four teenage boys, Luc, Johnny, Matt and Mark, as they manage their way through secondary school. Despite their differing personalities and backgrounds, the friends spend their free time together, hanging out in the Lanes, coming up with new games (most of which would be considered anti-social), drinking and taking drugs. Each has their own hopes for the future but when Mark starts helping out one of his brother's friends, things change.

Having read Grow when it was published, I knew that Play would pull no punches and I was right. This is a straight-talking novel that takes four very different friends who are trying to navigate their teenage years and shows what can happen to them. The writing is realistic and the dialogue brings depth to the characters.

One of the main themes of the book is county-lines and how easy it is to become embroiled in drug dealing. It happens almost without Mark realising; he's simply helping out one of his brother's associates, but the lure of expensive phones, plenty of cash and a bit of status very quickly snowballs into something much more serious and dangerous. It's chilling to read but something that is very real, as the book shows.

Navigating friendships, drinking, drug taking, sexuality, relationships and pushy parents are all covered in the course of the book. Each topic is believably woven into the plot and is done in a way that is relatable and things that many teenage readers will be able to associate with. There are points in the book that can make for uncomfortable reading (Luc on holiday; many of the things Mark becomes embroiled in...) but this is all the more reason for the book to be read for they are incidents that teenagers (boys in particular here) can get themselves into and the book highlights the consequences of their actions. My teenage son read this before me and said that he feels it needs to be in every school library and is an important read - I couldn't agree more.

The end of the book is thought-provoking and sobering. When I finish a book, I generally simply close it and move on, but with Play, I sat for quite a while just thinking about the book and the boys within its pages. This is a book that needs to be in every secondary school in the country and will show teenagers and adults alike the dangers that our teenagers face today.

Publishing on the 5th October, Play is a hard-hitting, important read that is an important read for older teenagers.

Haunting and vibrant portrayal of teenage friends, masculinity and county lines. Palmer's prose is beautiful and his characterisation complex. A must for teenage libraries.

This is very much a read for teens plus, especially, say, fans of Patrick Ness. It is a hard-hitting novel about four boys as they move through the years of secondary school. Despite very different social backgrounds, and indeed personalities, they have remained a group of close friends since primary school days and entertain themselves by inventing and playing a variety of ‘games’, many of which would not really be considered games at all by many. It is a realistic narrative about boys whose behaviour is often ‘anti-social’, what some might even consider ‘delinquent’. But every page of it rings true and these characters and their dialogue are brilliantly evoked with real depth and insight. The story covers issues of developing sexuality (straight and gay), of alcohol and drug-abuse, and of the easy road these bring into serious criminalisation for some youngsters . This is a book of which I think some parents will disapprove (and very probably some teachers too), but that is exactly why they should read it. This is the very thing that makes it great. Together with skilfully layered multi-perspective and compelling storytelling its unflinching honesty is the very reason its intended audience will appreciate it so enthusiastically. May young people will recognise this as real life. They will identify with one or other of its characters and those who don’t will know kids who are like them. The book had much to say about life, about teen boys and about the ‘games’ we play to get through, weather creative or destructive. However it is the remarkable ending that reveals it as the very fine work of that fiction it is,

My full review is now on my book blog magicfictionsincepotter.blogspot.com.

The quality of the writing is impeccable. It is a story about four boys growing up in a small town. The friendship between them is beautiful.

It is a book that probably will be more popular among boys though.