Losers Bracket Hardcover – April 3, 2018

This book attempts a major feat, to get into the mind of a foster child as she tries to navigate the worlds of her birth family and foster parents. That it does rather well. There are parts that are terribly unrealistic, but the main character and her feelings are completely authentic and relatable which is a major accomplishment. I recommend it to anyone trying to understand the world a foster kid comes from or a foster kid trying to understand the world they are thrust into. It bridges those two worlds reasonably well. The book suffers at the end from an attempt to bend reality to make a tough situation work. I found it annoying enough to sour the story and if the subject matter wasn’t so novel and the main character so compelling I wouldn’t recommend it at all. But as is the book does tell the push pull of different sorts of family on the foster kid extremely well.

One of the best young adult lit books I’ve read recently. As always, Crutcher’s use of edgy language in a scene or two just serves to bring an authenticity to the characters and the struggles of a young lady in the foster system. Powerful messages throughout this book will really speak to teen readers and adults alike. I would highly recommend this for anyone facing difficult situations or decisions in their life.

I have read Chris Crutchers’ stories and made my students read Chris Crutchers’ stories since I first discovered him moons ago. He is authentic and speaks the truth through his characters and through his presence in the worldLoved Losers Bracket- all the characters were real and I loved that the happy ending still had a bit of forbidding to it since after all life isn’t all roses and families come with thorns as well.

Crutcher captures humanity at its best and worst.

Loser’s Bracket by Chris CrutcherI met Chris Crutcher at a National Council of Teachers of English convention in Orlando (could have been Anaheim) in the late 1980’s where he was giving a presentation on Young Adult fiction. He was a trim, handsome, athletic looking man who was a school counselor and an athlete. Someone asked him what set young adult fiction aside from other fiction works. He responded, “The length.” I was intrigued, bought a couple of his books and devoured them avidly. I was teaching English at the time and chair of a large English Department in a Pennsylvania school district. I enjoyed the books, thought them useful for non-readers and less able students in our district, and encountered strong resistance to using them as assigned reading when I suggested it to my colleagues. Since heading in other directions, I rarely read Young Adult (also called Adolescent Literature) these days, but when I do, I usually enjoy a good read dealing with the problems of developing young people whose feelings are close to the surface and whose experience is limited, to be interesting and arresting reads while not demanding too much of me. They deal with the real problems adolescents encounter: popularity, over-weight, dis-functional family life, adjustment to sexuality, and maturation, and more. These are all real problems that young people often find it difficult to discuss with adults. Thus the novels can provide help to them, or a platform for such discussions. As such, reading them can be crucial to helping with problems young people are encountering in their real life in ways that can displace the problem onto others they encounter in the pages of a book. They can discuss these issues with other kids or adults who know how to listen in constructive and useful ways. English teachers who say, “I’m a teacher, not a therapist” are missing the point as well as a chance to involve their students in literature which can turn them into lifelong readers.Loser’s Bracket by Chris Crutcher (Greenwillow Books, 2018, 256 pp, $17.99/9.99) is told in first person narrative by Annie Boots, both a gifted athlete and student, whose life has been fractured. Her mother Nancy is over-weight, an alcoholic and drug abuser. Her sister Sheila a drug abuser in and out of rehab, an absent father, and Sheila’s son, who has his own problems. Nancy has been removed from custody, and Annie has been fostered by an upper middle-class family named Howard, which has its own problems, but, despite the father’s controlling needs to make her a star athlete, which she is anyway, Annie’s in a good situation while yearning to stay connected to her biological family. The story revolves around the interactions between and within these two families and the custody system. Annie describes the situation in breezy, accessible language with a degree of understanding and anxious good humor. She comes across as likable and insightful while trying to deal with her own problems.In the guise of a book club held at the local library, and definitely not in school, Crutcher includes a chapter about the writing process that, for any student struggling with writing anything contains some of the best advice I’ve ever read about how to achieve a desired outcome, no matter what emerges and how surprising it might be. Annie, carrying all her load of Nancy, her mother, Sheilla, her sister and Sheila’s missing son, as well as her foster parents and all the talents and skills she has remains, as she has been throughout the book, an open conduit to experience with a blockage for internalizing what she learns. As the story moves along, the characters learn that unlike in the books they read to each other, they are the authors of their own stories. Thus, the novel moves the characters and the reader toward an understanding of each of our capabilities for taking charge of our own lives. The disappearance of her brother creates dramatic tension, keeping the story moving forward as does the tension between Annie’s foster parents and within her biological family.Chris Crutcher has written nine critically acclaimed novels, an autobiography, and two collections of short stories. Drawing on his experience as a family therapist and child protection specialist, Crutcher writes honestly about real issues facing teenagers today making it through school, competing in sports, handling rejection and failure, and dealing with parents. He has won three lifetime achievement awards for the body of his work: the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALAN Award, and the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award. Chris Crutcher lives in Spokane, Washington. (Amazon profile)Chris Crutcher writes stories that address issues not unlike similar issues dealt with in any novel focused on adults, but revolving around the lives, concerns, and developmental problems of teenagers. Telling this story in first person put the reader inside the skin of an adolescent girl facing and surmounting problems that would be difficult for anyone. He uses lively dialogue bringing the kids to life while the adults are not the adult stereotypes often found on television and in lesser books. These are real people living real lives. Loser’s Bracket is not just a good young adult novel, it’s a good novel. I was supplied a digital copy of the book by the publisher through Edelweiss. I read it using my Amazon Fire tablet.

Imagine a porcupine speeding toward a train wreck and you have the Zen capsulation of this book. Annie Boots is extremely prickly for very good reasons. She pretty much parented herself as a child, thanks, or rather no thanks to her absent mostly zoned out father and her overweight, thieving, drug addict/alcoholic mother, Nancy. She was rescued by Wiz, her social worker and the somewhat straight-laced, but very supportive foster parents he found for her. Annie's smart, athletic and uber prickly. Even so, she has two best friends and Walter, an enigmatic aging biker who served in the Vietnam War and has stuck with Annie's mom for a long time. Her biggest problem is an addiction to her crazy Boots family. She'll lie, drag her heels, even make her basketball team lose so they have to play extra games, all in a mostly futile hope that her mother and even more messed up sister, Sheila, will come watch her play. The mini train wrecks keep piling up, leading to a major crisis at a swimming meet, created by Annie's mother. It results in her five year old nephew, Frankie vanishing. Days, then weeks go by without any word about him. What transpires at the end of the story results in a couple people getting hurt, but more getting a new chance at the straight and narrow. This isn't a book for people who want smooth and sparkly. It is definitely for those who know what hardscrabble is all about and like flawed, but strong and gutsy heroines. Two pluses are the great book group Annie's in and the transcripts of meetings with her therapist.

I am usually a huge fan of Chris Crutcher's work, but Losers Bracket falls short for me. It is the story of Annie, a foster child whose desperate need to be loved by her biological family almost destroys her chance at a real future. Annie's voice gets stronger as the book nears its end, but I just did not buy her story from the start. The author does a good job of showing how difficult life can be for foster families in general, as well as the families that the foster kids leave behind. Losers Bracket represents a missed opportunity by the author, as it just does not go far enough in showing the emotional turmoil of children and teens that are thrust into a system that they scarcely understand.