Great message, cool sport to center the story around, and a nice cast of characters. Donte and his brother Trey are sibling goals and I love how close they are. Coach is a nice mentor too.

The story isn’t bad at all. I know I’m an adult reading a middle grade story so I definitely tried to keep that in mind. The only thing I didn’t like was the pacing. It works amazingly well for immitating the sport of fencing in written form, but it does speed up the rest of the book’s pacing too. It still works for the most part outside of the fencing, though you don’t get the up-and-down feelings as much because of it. Faster pacing sacrifices that. I just think there could’ve been a better way to keep the faster pacing for the fencing scenes but slow it down in everything else.

I would still recommend this book for anyone who enjoys middle grade stories with important messages or if they want to learn about fencing!