Boost

Overview

Savvy Bartlett is thirteen, sharp with a basketball, and tired of being outmuscled under the hoop. Her older sister Callie has her own frustration: she's a varsity cheerleader who wants nothing more than to be a flier, the girl tossed skyward at the top of the pyramid, but her build keeps that spot out of reach.

Kathy Mackel follows both sisters as they look for an edge — through diet, training, and sheer will — that might let them compete at the level they want. The novel moves between their two pursuits, using the language of sport to ask how far a young athlete should go to change her body for a game.

What starts as a story about court and cheer squad becomes, chapter by chapter, a story about the pressure girls put on themselves to be smaller, lighter, or stronger than their bodies naturally are.

Body Image in the Language of Sport

Boost belongs to a strand of middle-grade and YA fiction that uses athletics as a lens for examining body image, since sports culture often makes size and weight explicit in ways everyday life does not. A flier's position is, by definition, contingent on her physique; a shooting guard's effectiveness is not, yet Savvy still absorbs the message that smaller and tougher opponents get the calls. Mackel places two sisters with different bodies and different sports side by side, letting their parallel struggles comment on each other rather than resolving into a single lesson.

The book sits within a broader shelf of youth sports fiction that takes competitive pressure seriously as a source of real psychological risk, rather than treating it as background color for a game-day plot. Its interest is less in who wins the tournament than in what winning is starting to cost.

Why Boost Has Been Challenged

Objections to Boost center on its candid treatment of disordered eating and weight manipulation among young athletes. Because the sisters' attempts to change their bodies are depicted from the inside — as reasoned, appealing choices rather than clearly flagged mistakes — some challengers have argued the book risks normalizing restrictive eating or extreme training for readers in the same age range as its characters. Others have raised concerns about its suitability for younger middle-grade readers given the seriousness of the subject matter. The book has been challenged or restricted in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog, reflecting the same tension that runs through the novel itself: whether naming a pressure clearly is the same as endorsing it.