From Newday
June 19, 2005

bookends: BASKET BALL

BY JEFF PEARLMAN
STAFF WRITER

While training for my first marathon 14 years ago, I kept a running log to track my weekly progress. It was like a diary, but with entries on the mileage and pain. All these years later, I consider it an insanely boring read.

Which brings us to "She's Got Next," the debut book from an Arkansas-based magazine writer named Melissa King.

Save for the subject matter (King's book chronicles her endless games of pickup basketball), "She's Got Next" and my journal share much in common. They are about sports. They are organized chronologically. They recall personal, insignificant athletic moments in painfully elongated detail. They are snail-crawls-across-the-G.W.-Bridge dull.

King is a good magazine writer. But in "She's Got Next," she repeatedly attempts to extract something out of nothing. "Strange, how it is with some things you always look for, how you can go around with your channels set," she writes on (egad) the first page. "Me, I pick up a flash of orange roundness, a repetitive bouncing thunk so purely noticeable whether it's disappearing quickly into the sky or echoing off walls and ceilings."

Paging an editor. An editor, please.

King boasts the gifts of wit and sarcasm but uses both sparingly. She provides an inside view of the intricacies of the world of pickup ball, but overwrites and, in the process, kills any actual mystique.

Worst of all, King fails to pull things together. With the not so subtle subtitle of "Getting in, Staying Open and Taking a Shot," one expects some deep basketball journey of self-discovery or inner strength or, um, something. Nope. The reader forms absolutely no emotional connection to King, and sticks with the book only to see what she learned from her tour de hoops.

Answer: I have no clue.