Goalden Girl
Tracey Morait

Reviewed by Trupti Dorge

After Gemma's mother's death, her father remarries Shelley who Gemma's hates. She also has a young daughter Portia who is as irritating as Shelley. Gemma has her entire world uprooted when she has to leave her old school, her friends and football.

She is unable to fit in the new school. It does not have a football team either. When the PE teacher Cassidy lends his support to introduce a girl's football team, Gemma is ecstatic. But there are guys like Tyrone and his friends who will do anything to stop the girls from playing.

Then one day among all this chaos, Gemma sees her teacher Cassidy and her step mom Shelly kissing. She thinks if her dad comes to know about the affair, Shelly and her daughter Portia would have to leave the house.

The rest of the book is about how the girls manage to form a football team and the mystery surrounding her step mom's affair.

I have kind of have mixed feelings over this book. When I started reading it, I was like, 'okay, not bad, I can read this'. After some time, I was like, 'Okay, this is interesting'. But somewhere at the middle I kind of started getting a little bored. I felt the story was not moving ahead.

Then suddenly I was hooked. I wanted to know what happened to Shelly and her father's marriage. I wanted to know what the affair between Shelly and Cassidy was. And I could certainly empathize with Gemma.  As the book was from Gemma's perspective alone, there was hardly any character development for others. But I would not put that as a negative point here, rather just an observation.