Canary

June 15, 2013
In an engrossing, carefully unfolding drama, sophomore Kate Franklin adjusts to a new school, a powerful set of friends and a family that is falling apart. After their mother's death two years earlier, Kate and Brett's father threw himself into his work. Now hired to coach the basketball team at an elite prep school, he decrees that his children will transfer to Beacon from their public high school. Kate falls in easily with the popular crowd, helped, perhaps, by their interest in her father's prestigious position. Despite her enthusiasm about her new friends and boyfriend, Jack, readers can see her discomfort when Jack cheats off her homework or pressures her for sex and when her friends bully and insult her brother. When Brett announces his decision to enlist in the Army, Kate is devastated, but the popular crowd has no patience for her becoming sad and withdrawn. The incidents that lead to Kate's friends turning on her, including a sexual assault, are realistically and painfully drawn. Chapters begin with poems and essays of varying quality, although as Kate never talks about writing in her narration, the revelation late in the book that these pieces come from her own private blog is somewhat unconvincing. Overall, a sophisticated, evocative portrait of a teen girl finding her place among peers and family. (Fiction. 14-18)

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October 1, 2013

Gr 9 Up-When her father gets a job as the basketball coach at an exclusive private school, Kate sees the included tuition as a chance to escape her old school and the sympathetic glances of classmates and teachers who are aware of her mother's death. At Beacon, basketball is everything and the players are treated as gods; their shortcomings are overlooked, and their cheating condoned. Kate, as daughter of the coach, is granted ingress to the popular group and becomes one of the satellites orbiting around them. When she begins dating a team member, her life becomes absorbed by practices, games, and parties. She realizes that the boys expect favors-and that most of the girls are willing to do whatever it takes to be the girlfriend of a player. One of the seniors hooks up with every girl he can, usually a different one at every party. Kate thinks, as Jack's girlfriend, that she is safe, but she finds out she's not when Luke slips something into her drink and then tries to rape her. When Jack doesn't believe her about what happened, she starts separating herself from her former friends, but after a topless picture of her starts circulating she decides to fight back, making her private blog public after her father does nothing that will endanger his players. It's unfortunate that so little discussion is devoted to the aftermath, especially regarding the reaction of peers and the administration. Not dealing with the fallout seems like a dodge. Still, this novel delivers an indictment of athletic privilege and warns of the dangers of the rampant use of alcohol by teens, as well as casual sex.-Suanne B. Roush, Osceola High School, Seminole, FL

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