Catch - Softcover

Leitch, Will

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595140697 ISBN 13: 9781595140692

Publisher: Razorbill, 2005

Synopsis

Everything comes easy for Tim Temples. He’s got a sweet summer job, lots of love from the ladies, and parties with his high school buddies. Why does he need to go to college?

Then Tim falls hard for Helena—a worldly and mysterious twenty-two year-old. Their relationship opens his eyes to life outside the small town of Mattoon, Illinois. Now Tim has to choose: Will he settle for being a small town hero, or will he leave it all behind to follow his dreams?

About this title

About the Author

Will Leitch is from Illinois. He currently lives in New York City.

Reviews

Grade 10 Up–During the summer between his high school graduation and leaving for state college, Tim Temples works and drinks hard and discovers that he is not alone at the center of his own universe. In the course of about 15 weeks, he watches his older brother–a former baseball star like their father–degenerate socially and physically for no obvious (to Tim) reason. It's during this same time that he is smitten for the first time in his young womanizing life. Helena is more than five years his senior, hard-bitten by life and her own sarcastic attitude, and only Tim believes that the affair has lasting potential. Daytimes are spent working in a food packaging plant, hauling boxes, and noticing that his old high school friends are quickly fading into the old men who staff the plant year round. Only belatedly does Tim realize that he is different from most of his friends, most of his family, most of the town. He's leaving to be a college guy, in a world just down the highway but very far away in terms of prospects. Leitch draws readers to Tim slowly and places him within a cast of characters who are finely etched, realistic, and memorably quirky. Teens will recognize people they know among these characters, some admirable, most deeply flawed, all genuine. This is a keenly felt and absorbing read about this bittersweet rite of passage.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Gr. 9-12. The summer before college can be a stressful one, especially if you have a physically demanding, brainless summer job and you are in love with an older woman. Tim Temples has just these problems--as well as a reputation as a ladies' man that he can't live down and a golden-boy brother, who has just returned home without explanation. Catch could have been a formulaic, light YA novel, but in Leitch's hands, it becomes an authentic narrative of growing up in small-town America as the son and brother of well-known athletes--well known, at least, in Mattoon, Illinois. Tim is also a golden boy, and he suddenly finds himself evaluating his life, his future, and the reality of loving someone who may not return his feelings. Leitch draws his characters with depth and charm, creating mostly multidimensional individuals. Readers may wish for a better-articulated character in Tim's brother, Doug; his appearance is fraught with a mystery that is never divulged. But this substantive title will entice both male and female YA readers with its thoughtful, authentic, and romantic young man's voice. Frances Bradburn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

On Friday night, Helena is lying on the couch. She’s wearing a pink T-shirt with a picture of a cute bunny smiling and waving on it. Beneath the bunny are the words Sometimes You Make Me Want to Throw Up a Little. The shirt cracks me up. Her head is in my lap, and I’m stroking her hair while she flips through the channels. There are a million of them.

This house looks just like every other house that’s owned by grown-ups in Mattoon, except a little bigger and with some Mission: Impossible security system. The kitchen is huge and immaculate, the family room has pictures of Jesus and little signs that say, Bless This Mess, and the television is placed in the strategic center. The whole place is designed to funnel you into the television room. If you brought a caveman who had no knowledge of modern technology into this house, he’d walk through the door and inevitably gravitate toward the couch, where he would sit and see if any NASCAR was on. The only two rooms that really matter here are the kitchen and the television room. Everything else is apparently where you rest up between those two.

I won’t lie: we would love a home like this.

Helena flips past two old white men yelling at each other on the news channel, a group of midgets playing tug-of-war with an elephant, and an inexplicable rock-paper-scissors tournament. She lands on some sort of reality television show where people tear apart a house. Girls always end up on the wrong stations when they have the remote.

“Yes!” she shrieks. “I thought this was on tonight!”

A young, blandly handsome man is telling us about the Bluth family. They live in Omaha, Nebraska, and their family home has fallen into decay. Mike Bluth, the dad, looks into the camera and says he’d love to fix the place up but just doesn’t have the money. The blandly handsome guy comes back, puts on goggles, and smiles. “It’s time to change the Bluths’ life . . . EXTREME MAKEOVER STYLE!” He then takes a sledgehammer and smashes it into some worn plywood posing as a wall, and the camera starts zagging all over the place and some cheesy music starts playing at a frenetic pace.

“I love this show,” Helena says, smiling. “Do you like it? Do you want to watch it?”

I never understand why people love these shows so much. I mean, when is Helena going to renovate a house? She can’t even keep her room clean. I decide that these shows are like porn. People can’t stop watching them, even though they’re full of stuff they’ll never actually do.

“That part where he started hitting stuff with the sledgehammer was pretty cool,” I say.

“Oh, come on, you’ll like it,” she says. “Half an hour in, you’ll be begging for more.”

So we watch the rest of the show. For the first half, the handsome guy—who never wears his goggles after that first shot—destroys everything in sight, and they show him firing up a chain saw ominously, though, to my eye, he never actually used it. (Which is a shame.) The family is sequestered somewhere, where they talk about how miserable their lives are and how that house is all they have in the world. The second half, after the place is a mess of drywall and two-by-fours, a perky, well-chested woman who absolutely cannot stop smiling comes in with some kind of crew and changes their entire house around, bringing in new furniture and painting it and turning it into something that doesn’t even remotely resemble what it was before. The place looks nice, I suppose, and the family starts crying when they see what blandly handsome man and smiling breast lady have made for them.

The whole thing seems empty and brainless to me. So some people got a new house. Big deal. The way that house looked initially, they’re destined to make a disaster area of the new place within a couple of months anyway. I’m about to make this observation to Helena when she looks at me, lit up and nearly teary-eyed.

“Wasn’t that incredible?” she says. “That place is beautiful! God, I love that show.”

“Really?” I say. “I mean, I guess the house looks nice, but so what?”

“So what?” she says, her voice rising. “Don’t you get it? Their lives have totally changed—like that. They were stuck in that place, stuck in their lives, and then, before they even realized it, they had a brand-new start. They can do whatever they want now. Wouldn’t that be great?”

A single happy tear rolls down her cheek.

“I guess,” I say. “It’s just a house.” But in that moment, I see it. I see it all through Helena’s eyes.

I see the disappointment she’s had to live through and the shitty hand that life has dealt her. I see what her dreams were—and how those dreams never came to be. I see where her anger comes from—and her hope—and exactly how a show like this can move her the way it does.

I know. I look at her, and I know.

I want to change Helena’s life. And mine. There is no question. I want them to change together.

Edition details

• Publisher: Razorbill
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1595140697
• ISBN 13: 9781595140692
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 286