Category: Young Adult/Teen Copyright: March 24, 2016
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Five Ghosts---basketball players whose lives were cut short---return to haunt five basketball starters to help them try to win the coveted State Championship.
Five Ghosts, who were young basketball players that died too early, are given an opportunity to return to life. They inhabit the bodies of five living basketball players to inspire, motivate the five starters to the coveted State Championship. As they themselves continue to learn life’s obstacles that can only be overcome in growing up. Some of the ghosts were not good people and given a second chance. Some ghosts will continue their good lives. Rockwood High’s once proud basketball team is now in the midst of a 30-game losing streak as the long-time successful coach, is under fire from a principal who wants to use this opportunity to show that he is in control and thus impress the Board of Education members. The Phantoms come back to help, but also to save someone who is going down the wrong path to destruction. The five phantoms help a losing basketball team and its embattled coach, a community racially and socially divided and turn the season around to win an elusive state basketball championship. Coach Jones, despondent after loss of another game and a star player leaving the team, is about to quit on Rockwood and his varsity basketball team. However, he receives help from a supernatural source as five Ghosts arrive, former players, to rally the team. But they not only come to help, but to take someone back as a sixth man for their games in the corner of the sky. Every great team needs a great sixth man!
Excerpt
Five Ghosts---basketball players whose lives were cut short---return to haunt five basketball starters to help them try to win the coveted State Championship.
Professional Reviews
Five talented young basketball players from Rockwood, Georgia
Five talented young basketball players from Rockwood, Georgia's high school, were all killed at different times and in different ways but they all were much too young to die.
Now they have been given a chance to come back to earth for six months to play basketball once again and help out Rockwood's currently losing basketball team, the 'Purple Phantoms', and their beloved Coach Jones who plans on leaving Rockwood at the end of the coming year. Those five young phantom basketball players, Sharon James, Brown, Dan Gnais, Walter Williams and Ivan; Brown, miss human emotions, the aroma of sweat and the noise of cheering crowds. Sharon joins with former boyfriend Foots Wilkins, JB with Norris Nairse, Dan with Antoine Carter, Walter with Greg Reece, and Pick with Vincent Matthews to slip into their bodies, whisper words of encouragement and coach them on to better playing.
Purple Phantoms is a highly well-written story of a high school basketball coach, his current unsuccessful team, and deceased basketball players from Rockwood High School's past who played the game brilliantly.
The plot flows smoothly to the story's end as the living players come to terms with what needs changing in their lives and in their game and as Coach Jones gets to talk with the five dead players whom he still loves, misses terribly and will defend even if it costs him his coaching job. All characters, both living and those who have gone on, are three-dimensional and come alive as the story progresses. That the five phantom players must go back to their place in Heaven and will take another with them will be a difficult, somewhat teary ending but the addition of a sixth phantom is hinted at throughout the last chapters so that the reader will know what is coming.
Purple Phantoms is a brilliant book that young adults and adult readers will adore.
My memory of Elias is intimate but brief; I asked him, "what happened, where are you taking me, who are you? Tell me!"
In a calm voice; "Sara hush, you died.
