Falling
-
-
4.0 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Everyone expected fifteen-year-old Matt Shaw to be Jeffords Junior High's star basketball player. But Matt never went out for the team. He won't even touch a ball anymore, and he hardly talks to anyone. No one understands why he's changed, but Matt knows that it's his "golden child" older brother who's really been doing all the changing. Matt can't imagine what would happen to his family if word got out about Neal's drug habit and the strung-out strangers he's seen coming and going from the house when their parents aren't home. Matt can't tell anyone what he knows – not his parents, not the police detective who refuses to leave him alone, not even Katie, the one girl he's ever really had feelings for. But even Matt has to wonder eventually if he's holding on to someone he may already have lost.
With his unparalleled ear for teen dialogue and emotions, Doug Wilhelm's new novel is a captivating look at falling apart, falling in love, and all the falling in between.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alternating narratives by two 15-year-olds in love form the structure for Wilhelm's latest novel. Matt Shaw is a basketball phenom who stuns his family, school and hometown by not trying out for the ninth-grade team. Matt keeps his reasons for his decision-and just about everything else-close to his chest and spends hours after school walking the town alone, listening to rap music on his headphones. The perpetually inquisitive Katie Henoch attends Jeffords Junior High with Matt and is "the queen of the unanswerable question" to her group of close friends, from whom she feels increasingly distant. Katie and Matt unknowingly meet in a teen chat room and discuss the larger issues that trouble them. Katie realizes who she's speaking with, and after confronting Matt, a romantic relationship is cautiously born. Matt's thoughts and speech are as concise as the rap lyrics he adores, whereas Katie effusively races ahead of herself. ("Why did he quit playing?... And what did he do instead? Was it dangerous? Was he dangerous? And couldn't she maybe use a little danger in her life?") Readers discover that Matt's older brother Neal is languishing at home, consumed by heroin addiction; additionally, Neal has opened his family's home to a stream of teenage users as he begins to sell the drug. Wilhelm's writing is suffused with foreboding and this fast-paced novel will likely seize readers' emotions right through its genuinely upsetting finale. Ages 12-up.
