What do you think?
Rate this book
Finishing Kick
Callie plans on a smooth senior cross country season - then finds herself holding the keys to the nuthouse when she agrees to be team captain.Her coach expects her to blend the girls into a championship-caliber team to take on perennial champs, Fairchild Academy. Callie escapes into her running even as running the team makes her crazy. Mark, the boy's team captain, makes her crazy, too. Callie struggles to manage the team but Mattie, a fast redhead with an eye on Mark, complicates everything.Callie never backs off a challenge but can she pull them together with the State meet just around the corner?A humorous peek inside one girl's dream to guide her team to the winner's podium, Finishing Kick takes an inspirational look into girls cross country.Ten percent of the profits of Finishing Kick will be donated back to local cross-country programs.
- GenresYoung AdultSports
368 pages, Paperback
First published November 26, 2013
1 person is currently reading
248 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 4, 2017
As a runner and a reader it goes without saying that I love books about running. I relish in stumbling over those passages that describe my exact feelings in the words I could never find. I feel drawn intimately to the characters and their lives, attached by a common passion. So when I discovered the audiobook Finishing Kick by Paul Duffau I knew I had found the perfect long run companion. Bonus points that it is self published, because I love a rebel.
Finishing Kick is the YA story of Callie, a high school senior and unexpected captain of her school’s cross country team. Accepting this role Callie must not only learn to negotiate the growing pains of entering adulthood, but she must also take on the drama and challenges of her team mates as well. With that she has to juggle her growing feelings for Mark, a tech geek and her co-captain. To add to all the pressure the team is facing it’s last chance of getting on the podium at state finals, but that requires beating Fairchild Academy, the meanest and fastest cross country team in the region.
Set in the Pacific Northwest the book is the perfect runner haven. Fictional books centered on girls cross country teams are few and far between, so I was really rooting for this book to succeed. And in some aspects it did. The rhythm of the cross country season made me recall my own years running cross country and track in school (Go Hornets!) and Duffau artfully sums up the pain and pressure meets, as well as the completed relationships that arise from being part of a team.
That being said, there were elements of the story that just seemed to be there for padding. Some of the side stories while interesting in their own way, didn’t really have any bearing on the story or development of the characters. A hobo makes an appearance for a brief moment, as well as a senior prank Mark does that spirals out of control.
Also the characters seemed somewhat stereotypical and two dimensional: all the familiar tropes are there with the two feuding team mates, the clueless boy, the meddling little sister, and the identical twins who seem to be two parts of one person. Completing the roster is the old and wise coach, and the loving, stable parents.
Overall I gave the book 3/5 stars for it’s runner friendly theme and artful descriptions of the sport, but the literary elements could certainly use work. It’s a nice light read and the perfect long run companion if you’re looking for some distraction.
Finishing Kick is the YA story of Callie, a high school senior and unexpected captain of her school’s cross country team. Accepting this role Callie must not only learn to negotiate the growing pains of entering adulthood, but she must also take on the drama and challenges of her team mates as well. With that she has to juggle her growing feelings for Mark, a tech geek and her co-captain. To add to all the pressure the team is facing it’s last chance of getting on the podium at state finals, but that requires beating Fairchild Academy, the meanest and fastest cross country team in the region.
Set in the Pacific Northwest the book is the perfect runner haven. Fictional books centered on girls cross country teams are few and far between, so I was really rooting for this book to succeed. And in some aspects it did. The rhythm of the cross country season made me recall my own years running cross country and track in school (Go Hornets!) and Duffau artfully sums up the pain and pressure meets, as well as the completed relationships that arise from being part of a team.
That being said, there were elements of the story that just seemed to be there for padding. Some of the side stories while interesting in their own way, didn’t really have any bearing on the story or development of the characters. A hobo makes an appearance for a brief moment, as well as a senior prank Mark does that spirals out of control.
Also the characters seemed somewhat stereotypical and two dimensional: all the familiar tropes are there with the two feuding team mates, the clueless boy, the meddling little sister, and the identical twins who seem to be two parts of one person. Completing the roster is the old and wise coach, and the loving, stable parents.
Overall I gave the book 3/5 stars for it’s runner friendly theme and artful descriptions of the sport, but the literary elements could certainly use work. It’s a nice light read and the perfect long run companion if you’re looking for some distraction.
May 16, 2016
My original Finishing Kick audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.
Finishing Kick is one of the better young adult fiction audiobooks that I have heard in quite some time. The story involves Callie as she is completing her junior year and follows her through her senior season of cross country. The story delves into many aspects of Callie's life during this journey including her friends, her perceived enemies, her romantic interest, and her family including a tenacious younger sister. Her relationship with her younger sister is one of the more intriguing aspects of the book as it is developing. The relationship becomes more complicated as it matures through the story and tests their strengths and weaknesses as individuals.
This relationship was a very relatable aspect as a listener, as anyone with siblings can testify to the trials and tribulations of dealings with these relatives in the high school years. Also, Callie's relationship with the complicated character of Mattie is another compelling affiliation that causes you to internalize their feelings as their story unfolds. Mattie is not a character you like from the start of the book, and you definitely become curious to listen to her exchanges with Callie from the start to the finish. The characters were well developed and stayed true to the character through the book, making it a smooth listen. Although I have mentioned a couple of the interesting relationships in the story above that impacted me as a listener, the best part of the story is the inspirational story that Callie has is the relationship she has with herself. She becomes captain of the cross country team and must manage all of this chaos and has shockingly little faith in herself, but with the help of a very insightful coach, she shines in the end.
This is my first listen of the narrator Annette Romano. She did really well with this story, giving everything to the listener from the light-hearted humor during the casual runs with twins Anna & Hannah to the intensity during the final race. I would enjoy another listen from this narrator and I believe this is a good genre for her.
Audiobook was provided for review by the author.
Finishing Kick is one of the better young adult fiction audiobooks that I have heard in quite some time. The story involves Callie as she is completing her junior year and follows her through her senior season of cross country. The story delves into many aspects of Callie's life during this journey including her friends, her perceived enemies, her romantic interest, and her family including a tenacious younger sister. Her relationship with her younger sister is one of the more intriguing aspects of the book as it is developing. The relationship becomes more complicated as it matures through the story and tests their strengths and weaknesses as individuals.
This relationship was a very relatable aspect as a listener, as anyone with siblings can testify to the trials and tribulations of dealings with these relatives in the high school years. Also, Callie's relationship with the complicated character of Mattie is another compelling affiliation that causes you to internalize their feelings as their story unfolds. Mattie is not a character you like from the start of the book, and you definitely become curious to listen to her exchanges with Callie from the start to the finish. The characters were well developed and stayed true to the character through the book, making it a smooth listen. Although I have mentioned a couple of the interesting relationships in the story above that impacted me as a listener, the best part of the story is the inspirational story that Callie has is the relationship she has with herself. She becomes captain of the cross country team and must manage all of this chaos and has shockingly little faith in herself, but with the help of a very insightful coach, she shines in the end.
This is my first listen of the narrator Annette Romano. She did really well with this story, giving everything to the listener from the light-hearted humor during the casual runs with twins Anna & Hannah to the intensity during the final race. I would enjoy another listen from this narrator and I believe this is a good genre for her.
Audiobook was provided for review by the author.
August 23, 2017
Gets your heart racing. There is a lot of extra dialogue that could be left without. But overall really gets you into it. Some typos.
July 27, 2017
I love cross country and specifically looked for fictional books depicting the sport, which are not many. I applaud Paul Duffau for taking readers on Callie's journey as the new captain of her team. Her character is realistic--the way she thinks and reacts to relationships, future plans, and competitions are, at times, subtle, so you have to be looking for them, but they are there. Reminds me of myself in high school--a little tentative, wishing the confidence was there and navigating life in the shadows of more talented girls. I would have loved this book to be in first person or a close third with Callie; I think that would have brought us closer to the protag. There was also a lot of back and forth between secondary characters that obscured the plot. Overall solid, realistic story.
November 4, 2014
1.5 stars
I feel bad giving this book a low rating, for a lot of reasons. It's self-published, the author donates part of the proceeds to high-school cross-country teams (yay!), and there just aren't that many books about girls' cross-country. But it's just not that good. When I was in high school, I used to write these long meandering stories with a ton of character development but very little in the way of plot. This book reminds me of those stories. The last chapter, focusing on the state meet, is great, and I love the very very end, but everything leading up to that point is kind of boring and unnecessarily long. Why the zombie prank? Why the homeless guy? These are distractions that added nothing to the story.
It also drove me nuts that Duffau didn't include running times in the book. If you're going to make reference to how Callie is running "10 seconds faster than her best" or Jenessa is "4 seconds off her own record," I'm going to need to know how fast her best and her record are. Why yes, yes I would like to feel competitive against fictional teenage characters, thank you.
Because it's self-published, I'll give him a pass on the semi-frequent grammatical errors, though spell check should pick up "teh" and the misuse of "you're" versus "your."
Sorry Paul. I wanted to like it.
I feel bad giving this book a low rating, for a lot of reasons. It's self-published, the author donates part of the proceeds to high-school cross-country teams (yay!), and there just aren't that many books about girls' cross-country. But it's just not that good. When I was in high school, I used to write these long meandering stories with a ton of character development but very little in the way of plot. This book reminds me of those stories. The last chapter, focusing on the state meet, is great, and I love the very very end, but everything leading up to that point is kind of boring and unnecessarily long. Why the zombie prank? Why the homeless guy? These are distractions that added nothing to the story.
It also drove me nuts that Duffau didn't include running times in the book. If you're going to make reference to how Callie is running "10 seconds faster than her best" or Jenessa is "4 seconds off her own record," I'm going to need to know how fast her best and her record are. Why yes, yes I would like to feel competitive against fictional teenage characters, thank you.
Because it's self-published, I'll give him a pass on the semi-frequent grammatical errors, though spell check should pick up "teh" and the misuse of "you're" versus "your."
Sorry Paul. I wanted to like it.
February 24, 2015
I just finished "Finishing Kick" and loved it. He nailed high school running, girls, and xc teams.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews