My Brother's Keeper

by Patricia McCormick

Overview

Toby Malone looks up to his brother Jake. Everyone does. He is the cool one, the one who is good at baseball. Even Mr. Furry, the unfortunately named family cat, seems to prefer him to everyone else. Toby and Jake and their little brother have always had an easy, jostling friendship, in which it is them against the rest of the world. But ever since Toby's father left, things have been off balance. Toby's mother seems deflated and resigned. And his little brother is exhibiting odd signs of stress. Toby struggles to keep his family together even as things are falling apart. Despite his efforts, though, Jake is drifting farther and farther away, and Toby knows it is because he is becoming increasingly dependent on drugs. Toby tries to cover up for Jake, to spare his mother yet another disappointment. But his attempts to protect Jake and his mother backfire, only adding to the growing tension between the brothers+until Jake finally goes much too far. With great warmth and wry humor, Patricia McCormick draws a portrait of a typical family that is struggling to reconnect after a crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781423141099
Publisher:	Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	07/10/2010
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Lexile:	950L (what's this?)
File size:	297 KB
Age Range:	10 - 14 Years

About the Author

To research Sold, Patricia McCormick traveled to India and Nepal where she interviewed the women of Calcutta's red-light district and girls who have been rescued from the sex trade. She is also the author of the acclaimed novels Cut and My Brother's Keeper.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Nurse Wesley's standing in the front of the room acting like it's perfectly normal to have words like puberty and hormones and safe sex on the blackboard. The other guys in my class are calling out words for certain body parts -- partly to see if they count and partly because Nurse Wesley's chest shakes when she writes on the board. Nurse Breastly, they call her. Meanwhile, I'm taking inventory of the number of hairs on the back of Paul Badowski's neck, who I purposely sat behind because he has the most enormous head in the class, and wondering if it's scientifically possible for a person to die of embarrassment.

It's Human Sexuality class, which of all the cruel and unusual things they do to kids in high school, has to be the cruelest. And, according to my brother Jake, who went through this last year, the worst is yet to come, when Nurse Wesley brings in an actual real-life condom and shows us how to use it by putting it on a banana. When I heard that, I told my mother I planned to come down with the Ebola virus or diphtheria or something; but she said I was going to school whether I liked it or not, because as the single mother of three boys she was relying on the Pittsburgh public school system to handle the sex education.

"Why can't I wait till I really need it?" I said. "Like when I'm in my forties."

She just laughed.

"But it's not age-appropriate for me," I said, which is technically true, on account of me only being thirteen from skipping a grade when I was little.

But my mom said if I was old enough to go on eBay to trade baseball cards, I was old enough to learn about human sexuality.

So, here I am, sitting behind Paul Badowski, trying to remember if sweaty palms and an elevated pulse are two of the warning signs of a heart attack, when he raises his hand.

I send urgent, heavy-duty ESP vibes to the back of his head, telling him to go back to sleep like he was in math class. But he waves his hand so hard it's like he's hanging on to the last piece of wreckage from the Titanic, and the S.S. Carpathia has just sailed into view. "Oooh, oooh," he says.

Nurse Wesley looks in his direction. Which means she looks in my direction. Which means I slide so far down in my seat, I look like I have a terminal case of curvature of the spine.

"Yes, Paul," she says.

"Nurse Br..." He starts laughing. "I mean, Nurse Wesley?"

"Yes?"

Whatever it is Badowski has to say it's so hysterical he can't get it out.

"Paul," she says. "The class is waiting."

"Nurse Wesley... " He takes a deep breath. "What's a midlife crisis?"

"A midlife crisis?" You can tell she doesn't think this is especially funny. "It's really not something we usually cover in human sexuality class, but I suppose, if you want to know..." Her voice trails off.

"Is that what Toby Malone is going through?"

At the sound of my name, the entire class turns around to look at me. At which point I decide I'm glad that Nurse Wesley is a certified health-care professional, because in a minute I'm going to need CPR.

She, however, doesn't seem to see the gravity of the situation. She makes one of those superpatient teacherly faces that you can tell means that if she weren't a teacher she'd be laughing. Which is what pretty much everyone else in the class is doing.

Editorial Reviews

One of the best things in the book is the way McCormick captures Toby's isolation, sadness, desperation.
— The New York Times

Lois Metzger

What's a ninth grader to do? Thirteen-year-old Toby Malone thinks he has to keep everything together: Ever since Dad left, Mom's moping, older brother Jake's increasingly reckless and secretive and little brother Eli is more withdrawn. Toby's also expected to live up to Jake's status as the school's star baseball player. All this while it's just dawning on him that the cute girl in school likes him. Then Toby, reluctantly along for a joy ride with Jake and his smarmy new friends, nearly gets creamed in a serious accident, and he realizes that he can't hide Jake's drug use from their mom anymore; serious consequences ensue. Brother ain't heavy, though. Toby's a likable, relatable protagonist, and he tells his story in very humorous first person as McCormick pulls off that rare feat of treating a serious subject with just the right lightness of tone. Splendidly done. (Fiction. 11-13)

Kirkus Reviews