Now and at the Hour

by Bess Kercher

Overview

For twelve-year-old Catholic school kid Albert Davidson, skateboarding in the hills and parks of San Francisco provides a sense of freedom and adventure to an otherwise cautious lifestyle. He's always been one to keep things steady and under tight control (even if he has to tell the occasional lie to do so). This careful approach to life is turned upside down when his mom is diagnosed with cancer.

Even as Albert struggles to keep things normal by hanging out with his two best friends, his life continues to be full of surprises. While hiking one day near Lands End, he jumps into dangerous waters to rescue a dying shark-an act that is recorded by onlookers. Videos of the bold act soon go viral, and Albert becomes an internet celebrity overnight. His newfound popularity launches an unusual quest for healing, fueled by his mom's intensifying battle and Albert's determination to find a cure. A quieter adventure unfolds with the boys and a mysterious stranger, whose unsafe circumstances lead Albert to double down on his secrets and lies. With problems escalating all around him, will Albert find the remedies he so desperately seeks?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781735560168
Publisher:	Warren Publishing, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Pages:	210
Sales rank:	264,874
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.48(d)
Age Range:	10 - 12 Years

About the Author

Bess Kercher indulged her love of stories at Davidson College, where she majored in English and dabbled in creative writing. She later obtained a communications degree from Queens University of Charlotte and began freelance writing, contributing to charlotteobserver.com and their MomsCharlotte page from 2013-2017. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband, two sons, and dog, Maddie.

Editorial Reviews

2021-02-15
A tween confronts his mother’s cancer diagnosis with the help of the Roman Catholic Church, Twitter, and a stranded shark in this middle-grade coming-of-age novel.

Twelve-year-old Albie Davidson misses his dad, a soldier who died in Iraq. But he has a close relationship with his mother, Mary, who indulges his passion for skateboarding San Francisco’s hills with his buddies Flint and Jabari despite the scrapes and bruises he brings home. His world threatens to come apart when Mary is diagnosed with cancer, but he’s caught by a support system centered on Holy Hands, his Catholic school. Flint’s and Jabari’s parents step in to help Albie and Mary, and the tween gets plenty of counseling from a sympathetic teacher and ex-nun he calls “Sister.” Social media also rallies to him when Flint tweets a video of Albie rescuing a baby shark on a beach, which goes viral and gets retweeted by Pope Francis himself. Albie’s celebrity provides a launching pad for a fundraising campaign called Save-the-Shark, which features challenges like skateboarding and rock-climbing feats to garner cash for cancer research. But when Mary’s chemo doesn’t take, Albie plunges into a crisis of faith and embarks with her on a pilgrimage to the Vatican. Kercher’s warmhearted yarn explores one of childhood’s most terrifying prospects—the loss of a parent—in a reassuring tone threaded with Catholic themes. The novel’s pedagogical impulses are sometimes obtrusive as it strives to wring overt life lessons from conflicts. (“Had I really planned to hit somebody? Even if it was Pat, and even if he deserved it, that was a terrible idea,” Albie reflects after a run-in with a bully.) Much of the narrative, including a subplot in which Albie and his pals befriend a homeless man, doesn’t have much payoff beyond pat uplift, and Albie is so swaddled in caretaking that he can’t fire off a moody tweet without everyone from Mary to Sister rushing to salve his psyche. But when the author turns her empathy and limpid prose to probing Albie’s raw experience—“The sound of my mom puking in the toilet. The way she fell asleep even when it was the middle of the day and I was talking to her. The picture of her face crumpling. The hard way she wiped her tears”—the results are evocative and poignant.

A sometimes didactic, sometimes moving tale of a boy navigating scary waters.

Kirkus Reviews