Skipping School
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Named to the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award Master List: A fifteen-year-old copes with a parent's imminent death by nurturing two orphaned kittens in the New England countryside
Philip Johnson has recently moved with his mother and terminally ill father from his beloved midwestern farm to a New England suburb. He works part time at the local clinic, where he helps the vet put down sick or abandoned animals. What he really wants is to save them, the way he did the endangered greyhound he found a home for with his friend Kris.
When a litter of discarded kittens are scheduled to be euthanized, he rescues them—only this time, there's no one to take them in. Hiding the kittens from his family, Philip brings them to an abandoned cottage in the woods. He starts cutting classes to care for them, determined to keep them alive as winter approaches.
A novel about a kid who feels alienated from his family, his new community, and most of all, himself, Skipping School is about finding hope and never giving up, even in the face of insurmountable odds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Haas's ( The Sixth Sense and Other Stories ; Keeping Barney ) ability to convey emotion through action and her eye for telling details give this heartfelt novel its subtle power. With his father ill with emphysema and his mother compulsively cleaning house and embroidering, there isn't much comfort in his new suburban home for Phillip, 15. He begins drifting out of school early every day and heading off to an abandoned farmhouse in the woods, where he chops firewood (a chore from bygone farming days) and cares for a pair of kittens that were slated for destruction. But with the school authorities on his trail and winter fast approaching, Phillip can't continue hiding from reality. During a lonely and frigid night at the farmhouse, he finally comes to terms with his father's mortality. And when he returns home transformed, the boy finds the love, understanding and hope that he thought had vanished. Spiked with equal parts of humor and pathos and rounded out with strong, well-fleshed characters and a splendidly evoked New England landscape, this is a book to savor. Ages 12-up.
