A sports novel that follows thirteen-year-old Nikki, a passionate basketball player who makes the cut for an elite-level club team and dreams of becoming a professional basketball star. However, the transition proves more challenging than Nikki expected—she’s suddenly surrounded by taller, faster, and stronger girls, loses her position as point guard, and struggles to find her place on the new team. To afford the expensive team fees, Nikki agrees to babysit her energetic younger brother after school, which means she’s missing out on the social bonding and conditioning time with her teammates. The pressure intensifies when her science teacher assigns a family tree project for a genetics unit, forcing Nikki to confront and reveal the fact that her biological father was a sperm donor—an “embarrassing secret” she’s been keeping from her classmates. As Nikki juggles basketball, family responsibilities, school, and the complicated emotions surrounding her identity and family structure, she must find the confidence and perseverance to compete at this higher level while navigating shifting friendships, financial constraints, and questions about who she really is and where she belongs.
DCP Stories Collection
Review
What’s Done Well
- The importance of self-advocacy. Nikki’s science project provides her an opportunity to advocate for herself with her science teacher, and luckily it all works out. Embarrassed about being donor conceived, Nikki asks her science teacher if she can do a different project instead of a family tree, and he shows Nikki and another classmate understanding in acknowledging that not every family looks the same. Later on, Nikki is able to decide for herself to share her identity with a classmate, instead of having a half-filled family tree hanging in the hallway of her school for anybody to see.
- Support from recipient parent. Throughout the novel, Nikki’s mom doesn’t seem to understand anything about Nikki — whether it’s basketball, or Nikki’s insecurity around her conception. But once Nikki opens up to her mom, she gets the support she needs to be more confident on the court and in finding out more about her donor, or as Nikki calls him, her “paper dad.”
