Alison Morris

My Teenage Sidekick Loves a Deadline
June 20, 2007

Here you go, folks -- another review written by my savvy 16-year-old sidekick, Katrina Van Amsterdam.

Deadline
by Chris Crutcher (Harper Collins/Greenwillow, September 2007)

Deadlines aren’t just for tedious homework assignments and stressful work projects. There is a deadline that, at some time or another, we all face: death. Some live in fear of that deadline for their whole lives, while other learn to appreciate life while they are living. In Chris Crutcher’s Deadline, Ben Wolf is told that he has a fatal case of leukemia and opts not to tell anyone, on the grounds that he wants his last year to be a “normal” year. Through football season, a quest to show up a bigoted history teacher, and some surprising new relationships, Ben lives his last year as any old 18-year-old with a terminal disease.

Crutcher touches on weightier issues in this novel – child molestation, to name a significant one. But, as always, he adds an element of athletics (football, in this case) for those of his readers who are avid sports fans. For the reader who doesn’t fancy football, have no fear – Crutcher makes his discussion of the sport very reader-friendly!

Deadline is one of the best books I’ve read in quite some time. It makes you laugh; it makes you cry; and it touches you in a place where most “teen fiction” novels fall short. If nothing else, you will come away with an invaluable lesson: to live life as if you have all the time in the world, while realizing that you might only have one day left.

Posted by Alison Morris on June 20, 2007 | Comments (3)