Elwood Riley has a mind fit for Marcus Aurelius and a body built for brutality. "6'6" of prime Cleveland hope," he is a blue-chip football recruit making his life's first decisions, a defensive tackle with a penchant for Zeno, a young man searching for balance in a world of extremes. In his debut novel, Elwood Reid offers an unsettling glimpse into the world of college football, a world full of bitter, behind the scenes barbarism, a world where there is pain all over.
If I Don't Six is an adept interrogation of the American institution of college football-the story brings light to the dark corners of locker rooms, dormitories, classes, practice fields, and weight rooms, places where television cameras do not reach, where young men sacrifice a piece of something precious for reasons that they do not understand. Reid's experience as a college football player gives his novel a genuine, gritty authority, but the meat of the narrative is not found in the gridiron struggle, but in the battle in young Riley's head, a player who ponders when it would be safer to grunt and hit.
Reid shows his talent sentence by sentence, a writer who packs precise, unpretentious prose with the type of power readers have come to associate with the likes of Carver and O'Brien. The narrative wanders between painful spaces-one of physical anguish where young bodies are beaten and bloodied, a world that is relentlessly detailed, and another space of emotional dilemma where Riley is more tormented than blessed by his pounds of muscle, where his mind is trapped within his helmet. Alternatives are thin, and he must sacrifice his reason if he doesn't want to "six,"-head back to Cleveland or wake up in a wheel chair.
If I Don't Six is a well-paced, beautifully rendered journey through unfamiliar physical and psychological territory. While there is indeed pain all over, there seems to be some chance for survival when armed with a helmet full of ideas.

-R. Thomas Coyne