Overview
Seventeen-year-old Brenda Jacobsen comes from a family of tall people. In the small logging town of Hemlock, Washington, being tall makes you better at trimming the high spots on trees or at playing basketball. Brenda’s life has always revolved around basketball, particularly the career of her older brother, Benny, the town’s rising star. But Benny died in a car accident last year, leaving Brenda and her parents without the star of their family and without a way to fill the huge hole in their lives.
Though Hemlock’s dreams of basketball glory died along with her brother, Brenda is looking forward to playing on the lessimportant girls’ team. This year the girls planned to get the recognition they deserve—but that was before their coach left to take a better job. Now they’re faced with a new coach, whose offbeat philosophy has the girls reciting lines from poems as they play. It brings them recognition, but not the kind they were hoping for. Still, when the sawmill closes down and Brenda’s parents seem to be on the verge of breaking up, she and the rest of the team find inspiration in the last place they’d ever have expected—poetry.
Synopsis
Seventeen-year-old Brenda Jacobsen comes from a family of tall people. In the small logging town of Hemlock, Washington, being tall makes you better at trimming the high spots on trees or at playing basketball. Brenda’s life has always revolved around basketball, particularly the career of her older brother, Benny, the town’s rising star. But Benny died in a car accident last year, leaving Brenda and her parents without the star of their family and without a way to fill the huge hole in their lives.
Though Hemlock’s dreams of basketball glory died along with her brother, Brenda is looking forward to playing on the lessimportant girls’ team. This year the girls planned to get the recognition they deserve—but that was before their coach left to take a better job. Now they’re faced with a new coach, whose offbeat philosophy has the girls reciting lines from poems as they play. It brings them recognition, but not the kind they were hoping for. Still, when the sawmill closes down and Brenda’s parents seem to be on the verge of breaking up, she and the rest of the team find inspiration in the last place they’d ever have expected—poetry.
Lauri Berkenkamp - Children's Literature
Brenda Jacobsen is a high school senior struggling with many things: the loss of her older brother, Benny, star of their small-town basketball team and the glue that held her family together; the loss of her father's job as the town's mill shuts down; the disintegration of her parents' marriage; the attraction she feels to the one boy in town her parents would really hate; and her own decisions about her future. Brenda's main solace is basketball. She and her teammates make a pact to bring home the state championship trophy to bring some life back to their dying town, and to prove that girls can play and compete as well as boys. When Brenda's basketball coach takes another job and the team is left with their eccentric English teacher as head coach, their dreams of a successful season seem doomed. Coach Hobbs assigns each girl on the team a new name, the name of a famous poet--Brenda's is Emily Dickinson--and instructs the girls to recite poetry aloud as they play. The girls balk at this at first, but as they learn more about their poets and poetry, they become more successful on the court and learn things about themselves off court, too. While this book has good intentions, it falls flat. There are too many plot lines going on at once for any of them to be fully developed. The result is a superficial glossing over of at least a dozen different topics. The core plot is about Brenda and her relationship with her family and how she copes with the loss of her brother. It is also about her town, the team, her sense of self, her relationship with her parents, her budding romance with her first boyfriend, her father's relationship with her mother, her father's sense of self-loathing, hermother's sense of a life not fully lived, and more. Any of these would have been plenty to address in the book as a single topic, but the author tries to pack all of them into the book and ultimately leaves the reader not caring especially much about any of them. 2205, Clarion Books, Ages 12 up.
Editorials
Children's Literature
Brenda Jacobsen is a high school senior struggling with many things: the loss of her older brother, Benny, star of their small-town basketball team and the glue that held her family together; the loss of her father's job as the town's mill shuts down; the disintegration of her parents' marriage; the attraction she feels to the one boy in town her parents would really hate; and her own decisions about her future. Brenda's main solace is basketball. She and her teammates make a pact to bring home the state championship trophy to bring some life back to their dying town, and to prove that girls can play and compete as well as boys. When Brenda's basketball coach takes another job and the team is left with their eccentric English teacher as head coach, their dreams of a successful season seem doomed. Coach Hobbs assigns each girl on the team a new name, the name of a famous poet--Brenda's is Emily Dickinson--and instructs the girls to recite poetry aloud as they play. The girls balk at this at first, but as they learn more about their poets and poetry, they become more successful on the court and learn things about themselves off court, too. While this book has good intentions, it falls flat. There are too many plot lines going on at once for any of them to be fully developed. The result is a superficial glossing over of at least a dozen different topics. The core plot is about Brenda and her relationship with her family and how she copes with the loss of her brother. It is also about her town, the team, her sense of self, her relationship with her parents, her budding romance with her first boyfriend, her father's relationship with her mother, her father's sense of self-loathing, hermother's sense of a life not fully lived, and more. Any of these would have been plenty to address in the book as a single topic, but the author tries to pack all of them into the book and ultimately leaves the reader not caring especially much about any of them. 2205, Clarion Books, Ages 12 up.—Lauri Berkenkamp