Quick Take
- Narration: Grace Li holds the emotional complexity of Christina’s eighth-grade year with sensitivity, managing interior tension without overplaying the drama.
- Themes: Friendship under competitive pressure, family dissolution and its invisible weight, identity in middle school
- Mood: Honest and emotionally alive, with the specific texture of eighth-grade anxiety that adult readers will recognize from memory
- Verdict: A sequel that earns its place by going darker and more emotionally honest than its predecessor, particularly well-suited for middle-grade listeners navigating family pressures of their own.
I read this one during a long afternoon between trains, fully aware I was not the intended audience and unable to stop anyway. Christina Soontornvat is a two-time Newbery Honoree who writes middle-grade with the kind of emotional specificity that finds its way under the defenses of readers who should theoretically have outgrown the material. The Squad is the companion to her bestselling The Tryout, and it does what the best sequels do: it takes the characters somewhere the first book could not reach because the first book had not yet earned it.
At two hours and nineteen minutes narrated by Grace Li, this is a book about eighth grade as a genuinely precarious time, one where the social stakes are already uncomfortably high and then something at home goes wrong and the whole scaffolding that holds everything up becomes visible and fragile in ways you cannot un-see.
What Changes Between The Tryout and The Squad
The first book placed Christina and her best friends Megan and Leanne at the threshold of tryouts, driven by the social aspiration of joining the cheerleading squad and the specific anxiety of being two of the only kids of color in their school attempting to enter a social space that had not historically made room for them. The Squad opens with Christina already having navigated that first year. She is more confident, has her own style, and is experiencing her first crush. The social ground feels more stable under her feet.
Then two things happen almost simultaneously: the uncertainty of tryouts returns for eighth grade, and her parents’ marriage begins visibly to collapse. Soontornvat structures the book so these two pressures press on Christina from opposite directions at once, the public performance pressure of the squad and the private grief of watching her family fracture in ways she cannot stop or fix. The result is a book that uses cheerleading as an outer structure while doing something genuinely substantive about what children carry internally when adult relationships around them fail. That is a harder and more necessary story than most sequels attempt.
Grace Li and the Emotional Register of Eighth Grade
Li’s narration is well-calibrated for the material throughout. The interior monologue sections, where Christina processes what is happening to her parents while simultaneously trying to focus on routines and auditions, require a voice that can hold contradictory emotional states in the same breath without forcing either. Li manages this without apparent effort, which is the harder achievement. The passages where Christina is trying to appear composed on the outside while something is quietly breaking inside carry a tension that an overbearing narrator would flatten into performance.
The friend group dynamic also comes through clearly. Megan and Leanne are distinct voices rather than interchangeable best-friend units, and Li distinguishes them through enough tonal variation to keep the three-way friendship dynamic legible across a two-plus-hour listen. A reviewer described the book as having great characters and action, and Li’s work is a significant reason why the characters maintain their distinctness rather than blurring together in audio.
The Graphic Novel Origin and What Audio Does With It
This title originated as a graphic novel, which means the audio version is necessarily a translation. Reviewers from the print edition specifically reference vibrant and expressive artwork as central to the experience, the spatial compositions of social humiliation and triumph that Joanna Cacao’s illustrations provide. Some of that visual energy migrates to prose description in the audio adaptation, and a listener unfamiliar with the graphic version will not feel the loss of something they never had. But it is worth acknowledging that the original form’s impact on young readers included a visual dimension audio cannot reproduce.
What audio does well here is what audio consistently does well with emotional interior content: it gives Christina’s voice a physical presence in the listener’s ear that the page cannot quite replicate. For a book in which the protagonist is working hard to perform composure she does not feel, the intimacy of narration as a medium is a genuine asset rather than a compromise of the source material’s intent.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Ideal for ages 9 to 13, particularly for listeners who finished The Tryout and want to follow Christina into eighth grade. Also accessible as a standalone for listeners who have not read the first book, since the emotional situation in The Squad is distinct enough to stand alone. Particularly well-suited for children who are navigating or have recently navigated parental separation, handled without didacticism or forced redemptive arcs.
Skip it if you have not encountered The Tryout and are looking for a sports-focused narrative rather than a social-emotional one. The cheerleading frame is present throughout, but The Squad’s real subject is something quieter and considerably harder than any sport. Listeners who come expecting a sequel about competition will find instead a book about what happens when the competition stops mattering because something larger has gone wrong at home, which is a more honest account of middle school than the genre usually permits.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does The Squad work as a standalone listen, or is it necessary to have heard The Tryout first?
Soontornvat provides enough context for The Squad to function as a standalone, but listeners who finished The Tryout will have a richer sense of the characters’ history and the social stakes of the tryouts. It is classified as Book 2 in the series for good reason.
How does the audiobook handle the parental separation storyline in terms of age-appropriateness?
The parents’ marriage collapse is handled with sensitivity and without melodrama. It is treated as a real and difficult thing rather than softened away, calibrated for a middle-grade audience. Children experiencing similar family situations may find it resonant rather than distressing.
Is Grace Li the same narrator for both The Tryout and The Squad, providing continuity across the series?
Yes, Grace Li narrates both entries in the series, which provides genuine continuity for listeners who follow Christina’s story across both books. This consistency is one of the audio series’s quiet strengths.
The original is a graphic novel. Does the audio adaptation feel like a full experience or like something important is absent?
The audio works as its own experience rather than as a diminished version of the visual original. The emotional interior content translates well to narration, and listeners who come to it without prior knowledge of the graphic novel will not feel an absence.
