-Overall Summary

Danny Walker and his friends, Ty and Will, just got out of schoolfor the summer, and are ready to go to the Right Way basketball camp. Danny is nervous about going, but Ty and Will can't wait. When they arrived to the plane, they met a new friend who quickly becamepart of there group named Tarik. when they arrived at the camp, they met more people and new friends,but also were reaquanted with old rivals. They were put into teams and there was a huge tournament. Danny, Will, and Tarik's team won it in the end, and Danny left the camp on top again.

-Authors Background

As a kid, Mike Lupica loved to play sports. He was really interested in basketball and baseball, and now writes all kinds of books and articles on sports. He had a basically normal life as a kid, and at the age of 23, his career in sports writing began.

-Inferences

I made plenty of inferences while reading this book, and an example would be, "On the worst day of your life,' Ty said, 'you're an A-." Reading this brought me to assume that Danny, the main character, is probably the best basketball player in their town.

-Literary Devices

There were many literary devices used in my book like dialect, irony, quotations, similes, ect. An example of a simile in Summer Ball is when Coach Powers compares Danny to a soccer player while he's running. I feel that Mike Lupica used all these different devices to create a better image for his readers, so they could better understand the situations in the story. This created a very descriptive style of writing.

-Theme

I would say the themes to this story could include: Never give up, Always believe in yourself, and things of that nature.

Overcoming different obstacles, to achieve your goals, is probably the main theme in Summer Ball, and in the book Heat, also by Mike Lupica, this is the theme thats really exagerated.

-Setting

The book starts off in a place called Middletown in New York. Its just a small town, where Danny Walker and his friends Ty and Will all hang out and play basketball all the time. They just got out of school and are getting ready to go off to a month long summer basketball camp, in Cedarville, Maine called Right Way. At the camp, there are basketball courts everywhere, and it is very hot. There's also a town near the camp, where the boys sometimes got and walk around and visit places.

It has to be this setting because they wouldn't be able to go to camp, or play basketball if it wasn't summertime, but this story could probably be placed in a number of different places, and not change.

The settings impact on the story was it gave the author a lot of different ways to describe and explain different parts of the story.