The Flip Side is the story of a 15 yr. old sophomore girl who is an excellent gymnast training for the Olympic team. Having been home schooled during her younger years to allow the flexibility for training and competition travel, Charlie longs for a more normal high school social experience. The transition to high school is filled with fun teen events, including the upcoming Prom, but Charlie is afraid to reveal the highly competitive sports side of her life. She makes up excuses for missing study sessions, social events, even dates. This sets up numerous conflicts, and is further complicated when she meets Bobby, a star wrestler on the school team.

The Flip Side shows the dedication and extremely hard work involved in athletics at the pre-Olympic level, and contains good lessons about dedication and hard work, etc. What is hard to reconcile for the reader is why Charlie doesn’t relish in her accomplishments and let her classmates and teachers know of her athletic life outside of school. Her boyfriend, Bobby, gets plenty of praise for his accomplishments on the wrestling team. But she doesn’t even want to tell him, the one person at school most likely to identify with her goals.

This incongruity is what detracts from an otherwise enjoyable teenage sports / love story. I would like to further investigate the school experiences of the author, Shawn Johnson, who won a gold medal in the 2008 summer Olympics. It is possible that there is reason why an elite teenage gymnast wouldn’t want her school community to know of her accomplishments and goals, but it doesn’t make sense to me as a reader of her book.