Q: Did you run into the same difficulties selling the book?

JB: There was a struggle over the slang title, Hoops. Publishers had never heard of the term, mostly unknown at the time. And publishers balked at such a realistic and adult-length story for teens. We were told by one publisher that, “quite simply, black kids will not read a book over one hundred pages long.” But since its release, Hoops has been praised by teens nationwide for its hard-hitting depiction of what kids are up against. Hoops has sold over three-quarters of a million copies worldwide to teens and has never been out of print—testimony to its fresh appeal. It literally has become the “Granddaddy of All Basketball Stories.” When you tell a story truthfully, with true-to-life characters as Walter has done, those characters will come alive for you on the page and your story will live on. I am so proud to have Walter Dean Myers give this story new life and pass it on to you.

Excerpt copyright © 2014 by Walter Dean Myers. Published by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

“She just stopped singing.” Ernesto, María’s husband, was a thin, yellowish man with a wisp of a mustache. He wiped at his face as we sat in the back of his old Ford. “That’s what she liked to do best,” he went on, talking to himself as much as to the rest of us, “singing and sometimes dancing even when there wasn’t any music.”

María Esteban was only thirty-eight when she died. When she stopped singing. She was my cousin and had taken care of me after my mother died. Once we had been close. She let me do her hair sometimes and laughed when I messed it up. Then we had grown apart, or maybe had both began to withdraw into ourselves, the way poor people seemed to do more and more. I remembered her singing as we walked down Fox Street to our little house. I didn’t remember her stopping her songs.

The pickup truck and the three cars that made up the small funeral procession moved slowly down Mosholu Parkway toward Van Cortlandt Park.

“She always used to sing. I should have known,” Ernesto said, more to himself than to anyone else. “I should have known.”

It was getting harder to tell when people were going to die. There weren’t many warning signs. Sometimes a slight cough into a handkerchief, perhaps a distant look in the eyes, but mostly it was just a turning inward. They had simply given up on life. They had forgotten their songs. When I saw someone giving up, I wondered if, one day, I would give up, too.

The casket was on the back of the pickup truck. It looked like metal, but I knew it was corrugated cardboard. Around it were a few sad flowers, pictures cut out from religious calendars and framed, and candles. Yes, and signs printed out in Magic Marker that read “Rest in Peace,” or “We Love You, María.”