Losers Bracket

February 15, 2018
Annie Boots, a talented white teen athlete in long-term foster care, employs an innovative strategy to circumvent an order prohibiting contact with her birth family.The Howard family (Pop, Momma, and son, Marvin) meet Annie's needs, but she refuses to sever contact with her half sister, Sheila, and their biological mother, Nancy. Annie knows they're violent drug abusers but hopes to at least help protect Sheila's disturbed 5-year-old son. She recalls her own miserable early years of repeatedly being removed from, then returned to, Nancy's custody, skilled as she was at cheating on drug tests. The title references Annie's practice of combining basketball tournaments with secret birth-family encounters, deliberately losing early games so that more must be played in order for the team to advance. Physical fitness, good looks, and intelligence signal worth in the story, while Annie's mother and half sister are portrayed as sullen, slovenly, and criminally inclined, repeatedly betraying the children who trust them. One-dimensional characters deliver didactic pronouncements, among them Annie's social worker--mood set to righteous indignation--who rails at a broken child protection system, its failures vaguely attributed to generations of irresponsible parents and incompetent dupes. At a time of growing income inequality and widespread drug addiction, the judgments rendered here appear harsh and simplistic.A portrait of a troubled family that falls short. (Fiction.14-18)

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February 19, 2018
Annie Boots, a skilled hoops player, feels like she lost the biological family lottery. Her mother is an addict, her father is absent, and her older sister is a 19-year-old mother, with no means of support and a troubled five-year-old son named Frankie. Where Annie did luck out is in foster care, having been placed with a well-to-do family. But even that situation is fraught because Pop, a control freak, is mostly interested in Annie for the reflected glory that her athletic accomplishments bring, and Annie continually defies him by refusing to give up on her biological relatives. Then Frankie goes missing, and the story veers toward solving the mystery of his disappearance. Crutcher, whose background as a mental health counselor has long informed his fiction, occasionally lets his characters slip into psychobabble (one teen refers
to Frankie’s “maladaptive behaviors”). Even so, his expertise gives the narrative, about the harsh realities of what happens when kids are failed by both their parents and the state, its authenticity. Ages 14–up. Agency: Darhansoff & Verrill.

March 1, 2018

Gr 8 Up-The last time Annie Boots was removed from her biological mother's care it seemed pretty final-even supervised visits were off the table. A talented student athlete, tough-talking Annie insists on spreading herself thin playing up the loser's bracket in local basketball tournaments, and joining sports she's not even interested in, in hopes of creating as many opportunities as possible for her bio mom and sister to come see her on neutral ground. This strains her relationship with her straitlaced foster family, and yields mixed results. When Annie's nephew goes missing at one of her swim meets, the systems that have defined Annie and her sister's life-bio families, foster families, social services, law enforcement, and the kindness of strangers-slowly grind together to find the boy, and figure out what kind of home he'll come home to. Annie's voice is strong and often bracing, her observations about her both of her families range from cruel to tender, sometimes in the same paragraph. Crutcher has a lot of messages to send about nature verses nurture, and about the system as a whole, some of which are presented organically, others dropped into awkward soliloquies. The plot takes some wild and soapy twists and turns near the end, but the resolution is realistically uneasy and complex. VERDICT An appealing narrative voice and fast-moving plot that will engage readers from the first page.-Beth McIntyre, Madison Public Library, WI

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