Jason and Kyra » (Reprint)

Kyra Evans isn't popular, or a girl who you stare at when you are walking down the hall. So why can't Jason-basketball star and the hottest guy in school-get her out of his head? Under normal circumstances, Jason and Kyra would live in their separate worlds up until graduation. But fate intervenes and the unlikely duo is paired up for a class project. Preconceived notions abound on both sides…but Kyra soon realizes that Jason is not the dumb jock that she had assumed him to be. And Jason finds himself telling Kyra things he can't even tell his best friend. As the two become friends and eventually start to fall in love, no one in school can believe it-especially not Jason's ex, who is determined to break them up. Being together means navigating the obstacles that are coming their way-but staying apart may be impossible.

Publishers Weekly

Davidson, a high school teacher, debuts with a tried-and-true teen romance, unusual chiefly for its setting in an affluent black suburb of Detroit. Jason, 16, is gorgeous, smart, graceful on the basketball court, and he dates popular, beautiful Lisa. But "fine-as-hell, super-jock, popular-as-Nikes-in-the-NBA, can-have-anybody-he-wants" Jason falls for "double-brained-nappy-headed-sweet-but-nobody" Kyra, his nonconformist, highly academic research partner from AP English class. Davidson describes the beginnings of their mutual attraction in spine-tinglingly prolonged detail, effectively camouflaging the staple elements of her plot: only Kyra understands that Jason, whose mother died when he was three and whose father leaves on frequent business trips, experiences his solitude as loneliness, not as freedom to do as he likes; Lisa, furious at being dumped by Jason, gets revenge in a manner that will be familiar to readers of middle-grade and YA fiction. But other story lines advance the narrative, too, such as Kyra's dedication to her project for a Westinghouse-like national science competition. Readers with an appetite for love stories are likely to follow Jason and Kyra's pas de deux from its beginning straight through to its satisfying end. Ages 12-up. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.