Ping Pong Kids

“This book is like if the tennis students from Infinite Jest were Chinese twelve-year-olds who drank beer . . . Ping Pong Kids is the greatest, funniest, most honest book I’ve read about the nature of prodigy. Renny Gong is quite clearly a prodigy himself, and this batty, brilliant debut novel will have you doing every possible kind of crying.” An uproariously funny and surprisingly tender debut novel following a junior ping pong player who travels from Los Angeles to rural China to spend a transformative summer at an elite Table Tennis Academy When our twelve-year-old narrator arrives at the Academy in Qingdao, he thinks he’s prepared: he’s the No. 5 ranked table tennis player in the US for his age, and under Mother’s watch, has trained his whole life for his hard-won success. However, the Academy is no summer camp, and the boy quickly learns that he’s arrived at a militant breeding ground for champion ping pong players, complete with 2.5-mile runs each morning, ten hours of training every day, and strict punishments for misbehavior.