Claws

In addition to his award-winning Billy Baggs novels Striking Out, Farm Team, and Hard Ball, all of which are ALA Best Books for Young Adults, Will Weaver is the author of two books for adults, Reed Earth, White Earth and A Gravestone Made od Wheat. He is the winner of both the McKnight and the Bush Foundations' prizes for fiction.

Mr. Weaver teaches English and creative writing part-time at Bemidji State University in northern Minnesota. Memory Boy, his latest book for young adults, was recently cited by ALA Booklist.

Grade 9 Up-Jed Berg's life is perfect. A junior in high school, he is an honors student, and has a senior as a girlfriend and the top singles position on the varsity tennis team. All of his friends are in awe of his close relationship with his architect father and his attorney mother. Then he receives an e-mail from a girl who demands that he confront his father about the affair he is having with her mother, and Jed's perfect world starts to disintegrate. Weaver's wonderful use of language ably reflects the teen's turmoil as his anger and hurt about his father's behavior spills over into his daily life, and he soon finds himself in detention for punching out his locker. This is just the start of Jed's troubles. His friends and family are shocked and it takes a girl in detention to put his situation in perspective when she quips, "preppies in a downward spiral are fun to watch." The novel, a character study of Jed, follows him through his spiral as events spin out of his control. The other characters aren't as strongly developed but that is to be expected since it is his reactions that are at the center of the book. This is a good choice for fans of more serious realistic fiction, such as Alex Flinn's Breaking Point (HarperCollins, 2002) or Laurie Halse Anderson's Catalyst (Viking, 2002).
Betsy Fraser, Calgary Public Library, Canada
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