Whale Talk
T. J. Jones is black, Japanese, and white; his given name is The Tao  (honest!), and he's the son of a woman who abandoned him when she got heavily  into crack and crank. As a child he was full of rage, but now as a senior in  high school he's pretty much overcome all that. With the help of a good  therapist and his decent, loving, ex-hippie adoptive parents, he's not only  fairly even-keeled, he has turned out to be smart and funny.Injustice, however, still fills him with fury. So when big-deal football star  Mike Barbour bullies brain-damaged Chris Coughlin for wearing his dead brother's  letter jacket, T.J. hatches a scheme for revenge. He assembles a swim team (in a  school with no pool) made up of the most outrageous outsiders and misfits he can  find and extracts a conditional promise of those sacred letter jackets from the  coach. After weeks of dedicated practice at the All Night Fitness pool, the  seven mermen get good enough not to embarrass themselves in competition. The  really important thing, though, turns out to be the long bus rides to meets, a  safe place to share the hurts that have made them who they are. Meanwhile,  T.J.'s father, who has taken in a battered little girl to ease his lifelong  guilt over his role in the accidental death of a baby, tangles with another  bully--her stepfather--and his growing murderous rage.Chris Crutcher, therapist and author of seven prize-winning young adult books,  here gives his many fans another wise and compassionate story full of the  intensity of athletic competition and hair-raising incidents of child abuse.  (Ages 12 and older)--Patty Campbell--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.