Call the shots

Overview

Don Calame's Call the Shots follows Sean, a perpetually unlucky teenager who has watched his best friend Coop hatch one disastrous get-rich-quick scheme after another. This time the plan is a shoestring-budget horror film about zombie-vampire hybrids, and Sean, despite his better judgment, signs on to write the script. He needs the money, but more than that, he wants to shed his reputation as the one guy in his friend group without a girlfriend.

What starts as a joke of a movie project unexpectedly turns Sean into an object of interest for several girls at once, forcing him to navigate three overlapping romantic entanglements while trying to keep Coop's production from collapsing entirely. The novel plays these complications for comedy, mining Sean's insecurity and indecision for humor as much as his friendships and creative ambitions.

Beneath the slapstick, the book is really about a teenager learning to assert himself rather than simply going along with whatever his friends or the girls in his life decide for him. The film shoot becomes the vehicle through which Sean is pushed to figure out what he actually wants.

A Comedy of Teenage Uncertainty

Call the Shots belongs to a loose trilogy of novels by Calame, each narrated by a different member of the same friend group, that trades in broad, self-deprecating teen comedy in the tradition of gross-out coming-of-age films. Shifting the narration to Sean lets the book examine a quieter kind of insecurity than the swagger of his friends: the anxiety of a boy who has internalized his own lack of romantic experience as a defining flaw.

The zombie-vampire movie plot functions less as science-fiction whimsy and more as a pressure cooker, throwing Sean into situations with multiple girls before he has any real sense of his own preferences or boundaries. Critics and fans of the series have generally read the books as comic exaggerations of adolescent male anxiety rather than realistic depictions of teen life, with the humor deliberately outsized. Within Calame's body of work, the novel continues his interest in male friend groups whose harebrained schemes force self-discovery, a pattern established in the earlier books in the series and carried through here with a lighter, more character-driven touch.

Why Call the Shots Has Been Challenged

Most objections to the novel center on its suitability for middle school and early high school readers, roughly ages 13 to 15, the audience typically targeted by its publisher's marketing and shelving. Critics in this age range argue that the book's comic frankness about teenage sexual curiosity crosses a line for younger adolescent readers, even when presented as humor rather than explicit description.

The recurring complaints focus on crude sexual humor, informal discussion of physical attraction and sexual inexperience, and language considered coarse for a school library setting. Some challengers have also pointed to the book's casual treatment of teenage romantic and sexual pursuit as sending the wrong message to young readers, arguing that its comedic frame does not fully offset the content itself. The book has been formally challenged in one state and one district tracked in this catalog, with objections consistently keyed to concerns about age-appropriateness rather than the story's broader themes of friendship or self-assertion.