Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher

September 4th, 2008 at 4:35pm |

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Audience: Young Adult

Rating: B+

Synopsis:

T.J. Jones is not the typical student at Cutter High School. Despite being a very gifted athlete, he doesn’t participate in any of the team sports… or at least he doesn’t until his senior year. Though a combination of chance events, T.J. becomes the captain of the brand new swim team – in a school that doesn’t have a pool. The only problem is that he’s the only one on the team who really knows how to swim. The strange cast of teammates that make up the rest of his team are both unusual and interesting. While these outcasts learn to swim, it is the other lessons that they learn during the workouts and on the bus to their meets that matter most.

Chatter:

(Spoiler Alerts! ) Chris Crutcher is one of my favorite authors for YA books. Especially because he creates such believable male characters and puts them in realistic situations. The cast of the Cutter High swim team is no exception – each of the swimmers is someone I came to care about throughout the course of the book.

I loved how the author used Chris as the student who earned the letter jackets for the team. It was so fitting that Chris was the one who beat Mike Barbour, especially since it was so frequently the other way around. I also appreciated that while Rich Marshall was unredeemable, Barbour seemed to grow as a person from watching Rich implode and devastate the community with his actions. Hopefully Mike will never again treat a girl the way he did Kristen Sweetwater.

The one aspect of this book that really bothered me was the ending. I thought the addition of an unknown brother was cheesy, anti-climactic, and unnecessary. The book would have been stronger if it had ended at the funeral.