Crash

Crash is a novel for young readers by the American writer Jerry Spinelli, published in 1996. Spinelli won the Newbery Medal for Maniac Magee and writes about ordinary children in ordinary schools.

The book follows Crash Coogan, a seventh grade football player and jock who gets his nickname on the day he knocks his cousin Bridget over with his first helmet and never bothers to be careful afterwards. His target is Penn Webb, a new boy on the block who is a vegetarian, a Quaker and a cheerleader, and who will not fight back or take offence, which only makes Crash worse. The novel is told in Crash's voice, so the reader gets the bully's reasoning rather than a lesson about him: the ambitions, the family pressures and the teacher who does not let him coast. Spinelli keeps the sport and the school year in the foreground and lets the change in the narrator arrive gradually.

The novel is one of several Spinelli wrote in the first person for a middle-grade audience, and it stays within the school year rather than following the characters beyond it.