The Dream Team: Jaz Santos vs. the World (The Dream Team, 1)

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You don't need to be a soccer(football) player or even know much about the sport to enjoy this story! Some of the other girls have no interest in the sport before Jaz recruits them to the team, but the story shows how beneficial the opportunity to join in is for them each in different ways. She faces many challenges including lack of funding and difficulty accessing resources for training, but she is determined to see her new team succeed. This is an inclusive and empowering tale with a real-life feel that will appeal to fans of Cath Howe and Jacqueline Wilson.

While this isn’t a book that is likely to become a new classic, Sophie would still recommend it to young readers, especially sports fans, and she still plans to pick up the next book in the series to see how the Bamrock Stars story continues.This is the story of Jasmina, who prefers to be known as Jaz, A girl who loves football and plays for the Bramrock Stars, a football team she created. So when her parents' fighting eventually leads to her mother moving out of the house, Jaz focuses all her energy on football, putting together a team that she hopes can win the Brighton Girls’ Under-11s Seven-a-Side Football Tournament. Jaz Santos gave casual but profound glimpses of a great and under-explored context too, young people growing up in mixed-heritage (and multi-lingual) homes. It is also about learning to self-regulate emotionally and navigating traumatic situations, like your family breaking up. Serious issues are explored with sensitivity and humour, creating a funny, moving and uplifting tale.

The novel begins with Jaz feeling helpless with the direction of her life: she gets kicked out of the dance club, gets bullied by the VIP (Very Irritating People), and gets rejected from the school’s football team because she is a girl.Not only was the main character's voice hardly that of a 10 years old, but it read like the author had forgotten what it is like to be a child. This was a cute middle grade, but I really struggled with the author's writing style, which seemed a bit amateurish and immature. A really interesting read about a story of friendship, football and family as well as the problems family’s go through.