PLAYIN' HARD

Cree Jacobs never thought she’d be friends with a member of the Ballers Club, until she got to know DeAndre Parker.

Seventeen-year-old Cree isn’t impressed by the Ballers Club, a group of four boys who have looks, style, and athletic prowess and run the hallways of Moorehead High in Akron, Ohio. They’re known for wooing girls—and then dumping them. Cree doesn’t understand their appeal until she encounters DeAndre, a former NBA player’s son who doesn’t believe in love or happily ever after but seems different from the other Ballers. After an Honors English class discussion in which they disagree about what love is, the two become friends—but can they resist turning their friendship into something more? This teen romance is narrated in DeAndre’s and Cree’s alternating first-person perspectives. The story centers on a group of boys who have “wealth, status, and a sprinkle of tattoos” and who frequent a strip club, and a girl who speaks her mind and is called a feminazi by the boy she later falls for. The stilted dialogue is at times cringey (“I’m not aimin’ to win a Pulitzer, but I’m a real dude, and you, you’re a real chick, so let’s get together and write something real”), and the story leans into the misguided narrative that the right girl can make a wandering boy settle down. Main characters are Black.

Tired gender stereotypes make this romance feel outdated.