It's the summer before Amanda and her best friend Lena are about to start at the high school. They are really looking forward to it, particularly since they both think they have a sure thing to make it onto the varsity girl's soccer team. While it is rare for underclassmen to get selected for the varsity team, Amanda and Lena really are just that good.

Unfortunately, things don't go quite as planned when Lena does make the varsity team, and Amanda finds herself playing on the JV squad. To some degree, Amanda can blame the fact that she has Sever's Disease, a condition in which the individual is growing up so quickly that the tendons in her heel are having a tough time keeping up. This leads to a great deal of pain in her ankles, heels, and feet when she does too much. This doesn't prevent her from playing, but it does mean that she has to be switched from playing forward to being a goalie.

Their squad assignments not only affects their game play, but it also is going to create some problems for their friendship as Lena quickly gets drawn into the soccer clique, which includes one of the hottest guys in school. Lena ends up being popular, recognized for the teams success on the field, and opportunities to date said hot guy. Amanda feels left behind ... almost an afterthought for her friend of many years. She is not going to settle for being the unappreciated sidekick.

Amanda starts building up friendships with some of the girls on the JV squad as well as one of the boys in her English class, who seems to have similar perspectives on a lot of the stories they are reading.

This is really a story about relationships. The obvious take has do with Amanda's friendships, both old and new, but readers get to join her as she gets to explore her relationship with her older stepbrother, her stepmother, and her father as well.

While very little is happening that is earth-shattering, this is really a realistic tale about the troubles that most teens go through as they start to define themselves by their ever-changing lives. Sometimes things are better than they thought, and sometimes we don't always make the best decisions, but in the end, we really have to take our lives in our hands and live with the consequences. They don't always have to be horrible consequences, though.

I really got pulled into Amanda's life. Halpin does a great join creating a really fun and realistic narrator whose voice is strong. In fact, while I was reading, I often felt like I was sitting there listening to Amanda tell me about everything that was going on in her life. She is able to steer her way down the soccer field of life striving for a goal. There are a lot of people to assist and block her passage, but she has great focus, and ultimately, she has a good time, even if things don't turn out quite as she expected.

This is a fun and light-hearted read that nicely embeds some serious teen issues into the background. This allows them to be explored without beating the reader over the head. At the same, time there is a bit of a fairy tale quality to the story that leaves the reader totally satisfied at the book's completion.