Whale Talk - Softcover

Crutcher, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062687751 ISBN 13: 9780062687753

Publisher: Greenwillow Books, 2018

Synopsis

“A truly exceptional book.”—Washington Post

There's bad news and good news about the Cutter High School swim team. The bad news is that they don't have a pool. The good news is that only one of them can swim anyway. Bestselling author Chris Crutcher’s controversial and acclaimed novel follows a group of outcasts as they take on inequality and injustice in their high school.

"Crutcher's superior gifts as a storyteller and his background as a working therapist combine to make magic in Whale Talk. The thread of truth in his fiction reminds us that heroes can come in any shape, color, ability or size, and friendship can bridge nearly any divide.”—Washington Post

T.J. Jones hates the blatant preferential treatment jocks receive at his high school, and the reverence paid to the varsity lettermen. When he sees a member of the wrestling team threatening an underclassman, T.J. decides he’s had enough. He recruits some of the biggest misfits at Cutter High to form a swim team. They may not have very much talent, but the All-Night Mermen prove to be way more than T.J. anticipated. As the unlikely athletes move closer to their goal, these new friends might learn that the journey is worth more than the reward. For fans of Andrew Smith and Marieke Nijkamp.

"Crutcher offers an unusual yet resonant mixture of black comedy and tragedy that lays bare the superficiality of the high-school scene. The book's shocking climax will force readers to re-examine their own values and may cause them to alter their perception of individuals pegged as 'losers.'"—Publishers Weekly

An American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults
New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age

Features a new afterword by Chris Crutcher.

About this title

Review:

T. J. Jones is black, Japanese, and white; his given name is The Tao (honest!), and he's the son of a woman who abandoned him when she got heavily into crack and crank. As a child he was full of rage, but now as a senior in high school he's pretty much overcome all that. With the help of a good therapist and his decent, loving, ex-hippie adoptive parents, he's not only fairly even-keeled, he has turned out to be smart and funny.

Injustice, however, still fills him with fury. So when big-deal football star Mike Barbour bullies brain-damaged Chris Coughlin for wearing his dead brother's letter jacket, T.J. hatches a scheme for revenge. He assembles a swim team (in a school with no pool) made up of the most outrageous outsiders and misfits he can find and extracts a conditional promise of those sacred letter jackets from the coach. After weeks of dedicated practice at the All Night Fitness pool, the seven mermen get good enough not to embarrass themselves in competition. The really important thing, though, turns out to be the long bus rides to meets, a safe place to share the hurts that have made them who they are. Meanwhile, T.J.'s father, who has taken in a battered little girl to ease his lifelong guilt over his role in the accidental death of a baby, tangles with another bully--her stepfather--and his growing murderous rage.

Chris Crutcher, therapist and author of seven prize-winning young adult books, here gives his many fans another wise and compassionate story full of the intensity of athletic competition and hair-raising incidents of child abuse. (Ages 12 and older) --Patty Campbell

From the Inside Flap:

There?s bad news and good news about the Cutter High School swim team. The bad news is that they don?t have a pool. The good news is that only one of them can swim anyway. A group of misfits brought together by T. J. Jones (the J is redundant), the Cutter All Night Mermen struggle to find their places in a school that has no place for them. T.J. is convinced that a varsity letter jacket?exclusive, revered, the symbol (as far as T.J. is concerned) of all that is screwed up at Cutter High?will also be an effective tool. He?s right. He?s also wrong. Still, it?s always the quest that counts. And the bus on which the Mermen travel to swim meets soon becomes the space where they gradually allow themselves to talk, to fit, to grow. Together they?ll fight for dignity in a world where tragedy and comedy dance side by side, where a moment?s inattention can bring lifelong heartache, and where true acceptance is the only prescription for what ails us.

About this edition

• Publisher: Greenwillow Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0062687751
• ISBN 13: 9780062687753
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352