When Erica moves with her mom to St. Louis after her parents split, she ends up one of the few white students at Truman High School. Her growing interest in filmmaking leads to her first friend, who introduces her to members of the TKO Club. The group of middle schoolers “mentored” by older teen Kalvin are encouraged to play the knockout game: choose a random person and try to knock them out with a single punch. Kalvin asks Erica to start filming their attacks. When members of the neighborhood rally against the attacks, accusing them of being Black-on-white hate crimes, Kalvin calls the protestors racist. Erica isn’t sure what to think but does know she’s attracted to Kalvin and can hardly believe it when he reciprocates. He is sweet and tender and patient with her, and reassuring when she expresses discomfort at him filming them having sex. Then a knockout goes horribly wrong and everything unravels.
G. Neri fearlessly traverses uncomfortable territory in a book featuring characters and situations full of complexities and contradictions. It’s part of what Erica struggles with: How do you know what’s right and true? But at a certain point, she understands, you have to own your behavior, and make up your own mind. Neri hones in on the effects of violence and abuse on an individual (Kalvin) and a community in this unsettling, gripping work of fiction inspired in part by real events. (Age 14 and older)

For Kalvin Barnes, the only thing that comes close to the rush of playing the knockout game is watching videos of the knockout game.

Kalvin's crew always takes videos of their KOs, but Kalvin wants more—something better. He thinks if someone could really see the game for what it was, could appreciate it, could capture the essence of it—that would be a video for all time. The world would have to notice.

That's where Erica comes in. She's new in town. Awkward. Shy. White. But she's got a good camera and a filmmaker's eye. She could learn. Kalvin could open her eyes to the power he sees in the knockout game; he could make her see things his way. But first she'll have to close her eyes to everything else.

For a while, Kalvin's knockouts are strangers. For a while, Erica can ignore their suffering in the rush of creativity and Kalvin's attention. Then comes the KO that forces her eyes open, that makes her see what's really happening.

No one wins the knockout game.

Coretta Scott King Award honoree G. Neri captures the notorious and terrifying knockout game and its players in an unflinching novel that's hard to read and impossible to put down.