Breakaway Run

by David Klass

Seventeen-year-old Tony, a soccer player whose parents are divorcing, goes to Atami, Japan, to spend four-and-a-half months with a Japanese family.

169 pages, Hardcover

First published May 28, 1987

About the author

David Klass is the author of many young adult novels, including You Don’t Know Me, Dark Angel, and Firestorm (The Caretaker Trilogy). He is also a Hollywood screenwriter, having written more than twenty-five action screenplays, including Kiss the Girls, starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd, Walking Tall, starring The Rock, and Desperate Measures, starring Michael Keaton and Andy Garcia. Klass grew up in a family that loved literature and theater—his parents were both college professors and writers—but he was a reluctant reader, preferring sports to books. But he started loving the adventure stories his parents would bring home from the library—particularly Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas. After his sister twice won a story contest in Seventeen magazine, Klass decided he would win it too, and when he was a senior in high school, he did, publishing his first story, “Ringtoss,” in the magazine. He studied at Yale University, where he won the Veech Award for Best Imaginative Writing. He taught English in Japan, and wrote his first novel, The Atami Dragons, about that experience. He now lives in New York with his wife and two children.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/davidk...

Reviews

[Lorry Chwazik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A teen exchange student learns to control his anger and deal with family issues while living in Japan.

[Scotts · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be a good book. It was boring at first, but then it got good about 30 pages in. It had great detail. I found it to be interesting as well. In the book there are Japanese words. They are there because the story takes place in Japan. Also you get to "see" how the Japanese live their lives. All in all, this was a good book. I would recomend it to soccer fans or people who like the Japanese culture.