The Sledding Hill

by Chris Crutcher

Overview

Billy, recently deceased, keeps an eye on his best friend, Eddie, who has added to his home and school problems by becoming mute, and helps him stand up to a conservative minister and English teacher who is orchestrating a censorship challenge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780756968953
Publisher:	Harpercollins Childrens Books
Publication date:	08/30/2006
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Chris Crutcher has written nine critically acclaimed novels, an autobiography, and two collections of short stories. He has won three lifetime achievement awards for the body of his work: the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults, the ALAN Award for a Significant Contribution to Adolescent Literature, and the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award.

He has been a child and family therapist with the Spokane Community Mental Health Center and is currently chairperson of the Spokane Child Protection Team. Chris Crutcher lives in Spokane, Washington.

Read an Excerpt

The Sledding Hill

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By Chris Crutcher

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Chris Crutcher
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060502436

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Chapter One

Death Does Not Take a Holiday

When we were in grade school most kids thought Eddie Proffit was stupid because he would ask questions no one else would think of. It's human nature to think if you weren't the person to think of something, it must be dumb. But Eddie knows things.

I was Billy Bartholomew, smartest kid in class; arguably smartest in school, which was supposed to be a minor miracle because my father is the school janitor. It is also human nature to define a person by his or her job, which is a mistake when it comes to my dad. He doesn't have a huge drive to get rich, so he's considered ordinary. At any rate, I was supposed to grow up and rattle the world, and Eddie was supposed to grow up and run his father's gas station. Everyone thought our friendship was odd; what was a smart kid like me doing hanging out with a kid with an IQ short of triple digits? Truth is, Eddie's IQ turned out to be off the charts. His mind bounces from one thing to the other pretty much however it wants, though, and long before he should be finishing up one thought, he's on to something else. Eddie doesn't come to very many conclusions.

In fifth grade, when my dad discovered Eddie scored sixty-five on his IQ test, he asked Eddie what happened, becauseDad knew that couldn't be right.

"I was answering the questions," Eddie said, "and then I started seeing what a neat pattern I was making filling in those little ovals, and before I knew it I was making neater and neater patterns."

"You weren't even reading the questions?"

"I wasn't even keeping it to one answer per row," Eddie told him. "Did you see my answer sheet? It looks way cool."

So my dad went to the principal, who was about to put Eddie in special ed for every class but PE, and told her she can't do that. "He scored a sixty-five," my dad said, "without reading the questions."

The principal was all into protocol and all out of taking advice from the school janitor and wouldn't let Eddie retake the test. But Dad had a key to every room and file drawer in school, so he found a test, took Eddie to the furnace room, and had him answer the questions five at a time. Eddie added almost a hundred points to his IQ that afternoon. When the principal told Dad he was out of line, Dad took the test over to the Chevron station to bring Eddie's dad up to speed.

Eddie didn't attend any special ed classes.

The principal went ahead and recorded the sixty-five IQ on his permanent record anyway and no one knew the story of the second test, so it was generally thought I did Eddie's homework for him when he started to get good grades. I didn't do one of his assignments. He would go to the furnace room for an hour and a half after school every day, and my dad would break up his homework with little jobs to keep him focused, and Eddie did great. But he continued to ask strange questions and challenge teachers when they said something he thought couldn't be true, and he was pretty much considered a pain in the neck.

Eddie and I used to run everywhere. We'd been winning the annual Fourth of July races as long as we could remember and had decided when we got into high school we'd be the heart of a stellar cross-country team. We were both too skinny to play football, and in a high school this small it is not considered cool to go sportless, so cross-country was it.

So it's early summer, five days after Eddie's fourteenth birthday, and he's getting ready to bike out to the hot springs with me to spend the afternoon swimming and rolling in the warm mud. Eddie's been working four hours a day, eight to noon, at his dad's service station, the last full-service gas station in the solar system, to hear Mr. Proffit tell it. It may not be the last one in the solar system, but it's definitely the last in Bear Creek, population 3,065, situated high in the Idaho panhandle, a few miles from the Canadian border. Anyway, Eddie has been helping his dad fix truck tires all morning and is ready to hit the warm water.

Bear Creek is a mess. Duffy Reed Construction has been hired to widen Main Street. They've got the pavement dug out from city limit to city limit along with another two feet of dirt below that, so if you step off the sidewalk without looking you could take a serious header. Proffit's Chevron, which Eddie's dad used to call Non-Proffit's Chevron, is the only place in town that fixes truck and heavy-equipment tires, and Mr. Proffit has been doing just that twelve hours a day -- four hours with Eddie's help and eight by himself -- to keep up with Duffy Reed's sharp-rock punctures.

He's got it down to a science. Air up four tires at a time to find the leaks, let the air out, break them down, remove the tubes if they have them, patch them, throw them back together, air them up, and roll them to the rack out back so the next driver with a flat can replace it with a repaired one and roar out in under six minutes. Four at a time. John Proffit's a tire-fixin' fool.

That day Eddie's dad stops only once to have lunch with Eddie's mom -- her name is Evelyn -- and he's back to fixing tires, somewhat disgruntled and distracted because he got chicken salad instead of tuna, and he forgets to let the air out of one of the tires before breaking it down.

Eddie's mom catches Eddie and me just as we're about to head out to the hot springs, and she gives Eddie a monster hunk of chocolate cake and some milk in a thermos to take to his dad.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Sledding Hill by Chris Crutcher Copyright © 2006 by Chris Crutcher. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Crutcher takes the fad in authorial intrusion one better, inserting himself as a character in this metafictional novel with a heavy-handed message, a schizophrenic presentation and a highly entertaining plot. Eddie Proffit is the very definition of a sympathetic character, losing his Dad and best friend to violent accidents in the opening pages. His story is narrated in Lovely Bones-esque fashion by the dead friend, Billy, who, if not in Heaven, is in a very good place-free of pain and full of neat tricks to employ during his ghostly mission to help Eddie overcome sadness so deep he has stopped speaking. The exploration of death and of being silenced by grief takes a hairpin turn when book banning-a very different type of silencing-becomes the focus of the novel's second half. Eddie's elective mutism has his mother's minister, the villainous Sanford Tarter, convinced he needs to be baptized. Tarter also teaches English at the high school, but Eddie is enrolled in a class called Really Modern Literature, run by a librarian who prefers "books by authors who are still alive." She requires everyone read Warren Peece by the "relatively obscure" author Chris Crutcher. Naturally, this "good book with bad words" exercises Tarter, who incites a crusade to rid the library of all Crutcher's "irrelevant and only marginally well written" books. Plausibility is pushed aside for entertainment and moralizing-Billy's father loses his job as school janitor for reading the book aloud to students in the boiler room, a student comes out as gay at the public hearing, another admits openly that she cuts herself-but Eddie's cause, and his decision to speak out, is so honorable, these lapses are easily overlooked. The title - an allusion to a favorite spot the two friends enjoyed when both were alive-doesn't work but, despite its flaws, the story does. Ages 12-up. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Eddie Proffit suffers "a hurricane of calamity" (p. 19) when he first finds his father dead at the family gas station and only two months later finds his best friend, Billy, dead in the school gymnasium. In that moment, Eddie stops speaking. Speaking is the only piece of his life that he can control. When he stops speaking, Eddie begins to listen, really listen, to those around him: Billy reaching out from the dead, Reverend Tarter trying to control his students and censor their experiences, and newfound friends confessing to being alone and afraid. When Eddie begins speaking again at a church service, he has a great deal to say, much to the chagrin of Reverend Tarter. In his first novel for a middle-grades audience, Crutcher masterfully captures the pain of adolescence: surviving death, strained family relationships, and questioning your faith. 2005, Greenwillow Books, 230 pp., Ages young adult.
—Faith H. Wallace

Another dead narrator! Billy Bartholomew dies when he is crushed in an accident. After death, he lingers in familiar places because of his concern for his best friend Eddie, who also is grieving for his own father. Billy makes himself known to Eddie and tries to get him through an impossibly difficult time in his life. Eddie's mother, also devastated by the death of her husband, has retreated to the fundamentalist church led by the Reverend Tartar. Eddie has the support of Billy's father, who is the janitor in their high school. Everything comes to a head when the religious right tackles the choice of a novel an English teacher requires. Billy's father gets fired for being on the side of the teacher. At this point, the story becomes rather didactic about why teenagers should be free to read about lonely, distressed teenage characters. Chris Crutcher himself appears as a character in his own story. The way Eddie manipulates the situation, pretending to be ready for baptism in Rev. Tartar's church just as he is plotting to defy the church and defend the novel, is great fun, really, especially since he has the help of his dead friend Billy. Since most of us are caught up in the horrible cultural and political divisions in our country just now, as apparently Crutcher is as well, this is a satisfying catharsis. Librarians and English teachers will appreciate the defense of a student's right to read. However, there may be just one too many long speeches for YA readers to wade through—they can skim, however. And those in communities divided like Eddie's is will really understand the importance of the debate. KLIATT Codes: JS—Recommended for junior and senior high school students.2005, HarperCollins, Greenwillow, 230p., Ages 12 to 18.
—Claire Rosser

KLIATT

To quote the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, May 2005: Another dead narrator! Billy Bartholomew dies when he is crushed in an accident. After death, he lingers in familiar places because of his concern for his best friend Eddie, who also is grieving for his own father. Billy makes himself known to Eddie and tries to get him through an impossibly difficult time in his life. Eddie's mother, also devastated by the death of her husband, has retreated to the fundamentalist church led by the Reverend Tartar. Eddie has the support of Billy's father, who is the janitor in their high school. Everything comes to a head when the religious right tackles the choice of a novel an English teacher requires. Billy's father gets fired for being on the side of the teacher. At this point, the story becomes rather didactic about why teenagers should be free to read about lonely, distressed teenage characters. Chris Crutcher himself appears as a character in his own story. The way Eddie manipulates the situation, pretending to be ready for baptism in Rev. Tartar's church just as he is plotting to defy the church and defend the novel, is great fun, really, especially since he has the help of his dead friend Billy. Since most of us are caught up in the horrible cultural and political divisions in our country just now, as apparently Crutcher is as well, this is a satisfying catharsis. Librarians and English teachers will appreciate the defense of a student's right to read. However, there may be just one too many long speeches for YA readers to wade through—they can skim, however. And those in communities divided like Eddie's is will really understand the importance of the debate.

KLIATT - Claire Rosser

Gr 7 Up-This clever, spirited post-modern meta-narrative is a quick read that is bound to be controversial. It has no profanity, sexual acts, drug or alcohol use, or bloody violence but takes dead aim at censors who can't get past counting swear words or the notion of a gay character who is still alive at the end of a book. Eddie Proffit, 14, is a prototypical Crutcher protagonist, a misunderstood teen who in quick succession has lost his father and best friend, Billy, in accidents. And he must deal with Mr. Tartar, who is both a feared English teacher at school and the minister to a flock of Protestant fundamentalists at the Red Brick Church. However, the author's approach to these familiar themes is fresh and fun, beginning when Billy, recently deceased, opts to keep his newly omniscient eye on Eddie, taking advantage of opportune "windows" to communicate, initially scaring Eddie into voluntary mutism but eventually working with him to bring about-the climax of the book. This centers around the use of Crutcher's faux novel, Warren Peece, in class and the community-wide uproar over it. The author's obvious delight in writing himself into the story (complete with e-mail address) does not diminish its effectiveness, though he occasionally gets his religious icons confused. Crutcherisms such as "When something seems mysterious and magical, it's because we don't have enough information" meld neatly with upbeat metaphysical speculation to give teen readers an involving story and plenty to think about.-Joel Shoemaker, Southeast Junior High School, Iowa City, IA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Eddie's "high-speed randomness" and habit of blurting outlandish questions at school and church are unappreciated. Within three months, Eddie discovers the bodies of the two most reassuring people in his life: his dad and his best friend Billie. Traumatized, lonely and scared, Eddie elects the safety of mutism. In death, Billie continues to watch over Eddie. Unnerved by this haunting, Eddie turns to the refuge of conservative religion. When his fundamentalist minister tries to enlist Eddie in a crusade to ban a novel from the school, Eddie emails the author requesting a letter to be read at the school board hearing. Enter Crutcher as the author of the banned book . . . a character in his own story. This sly conceit works for Crutcher who disarmingly pokes fun at himself. Weaving together Eddie's personal survival and his losing battle against censorship, this succeeds by limning its polemics with artful humor. This oft-censored author entertains, inspires, invites intellectual inquiry and concedes well-meaning motives to both sides . . . a lot to pack into a novel, but when did Crutcher ever pack light? (Fiction. 12-16)

Kirkus Reviews