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The Sledding Hill, by Chris Crutcher
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Eddie hasn't had an easy year
First his father dies. Then his best friend Billy accidentally kicks a stack of Sheetrock over on himself, breaking his neck and effectively hitting tilt on his Earthgame. Eddie and Billy were inseparable. Still are. Billy isn't going to let a little thing like death stop him from hanging in there with his friend. And when Eddie faces an epic struggle with the powers that be, Billy will remain right there beside him.
- Sales Rank: #228987 in Books
- Brand: Crutcher, Chris
- Published on: 2006-09-19
- Released on: 2006-09-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.13" h x .51" w x 5.00" l, .35 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly
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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Starred Review. Grade 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In "Dead Boy Sledding; or, Why Things Happen," a chapter in his autobiographical The King of the Mild Frontier (2003), Chris Crutcher remmbers being haunted by a childhood classmate's death. Another episode refers to his confrontations with censors for the provocative subject matter and raw language in his novels (Crutcher's books have been frequently challenged). When readers of Crutcher's newest novel wonder about its inspirations, they needn't look far: its themes of senseless tragedy and intellectual freedom serve as a natural postscript to his memoir. But this isn't nonfiction. In fact, it defies categorization, offering up a tasting menu of literary devices du jour, incorporating selective mutism, a narrator from beyond the grave, and a plot in which the author himself plays a major role.
The summer before Eddie Proffitt's freshman year of high school, his father and his best friend, Billy, die in violent accidents within the same month. Eddie is the first to stumble on the grisly bodies--a "hurricane of calamity" that shocks him speechless. Billy, who always kept tabs on smart but flighty Eddie in life, continues to do so from the grave, documenting Eddie's struggles and serving as a mystical guide, appearing to him in dreams of their favorite sledding spot, and exerting metaphysical "bumps" that jostle Eddie toward healing actions. Most pivotal is Eddie's decision to speak out against a powerful fundamentalist church's challenge of a gritty YA book assigned at school, a nonexistent novel called Warren Peece that deals with homosexuality and abortion and whose struggling characters make Eddie "feel less lonely." The fabricated book's author? Chris Crutcher himself.
Most YAs will be drawn to this more for its paranormal premise than any burning curiosity about Crutcher or the issue of book banning. And, at least initially, Billy's creepy, detached narration doesn't disappoint. Telling stories "in [teens'] native tongue" (Eddie's librarian's words) has always been Crutcher's strong suit, and his gifts serve him well here; the juxtaposition of Billy's intimacy with eternal mysteries and his slang-inflected voice are inherently amusing (death is a "way different state"; eternity "a pretty cool place").
nce the controversy heats up, though, the ghostly narrator begins to seem less like a quirky emissary from afterlife than an excuse for Crutcher to channel philosophical and spiritual views through a YA character: "If humans are ever to understand one another, they will have to come to terms with the concept, and the reality of relativity. . . . see how things look compared to other things." For readers who question such articulate sermonizing from a 14-year-old, Billy begs their indulgence: "Death brings out the lyricist in me. I know words I never even heard. In every language." The fluid walls between authorial and characters' points of view are overtly apparent when Crutcher himself appears at the book-banning hearing, points to a character who has just made a fervent, articulate plea, and says, "What she said." The message, of course, is meant to be empowering, but it's still a message.
Avant-garde techniques such as authorial intrusions and "postmortalism"--a recently coined term for telling tales through a deceased character--are common in literature for adults today, but have been slower to enter the universe of YA fiction. For this reason, The Sledding Hill is likely to attract attention for its rupturing of familiar narrative rules, and many YAs will certainly find the self-referential loop-de-loop at book's end a heady new experience. But ultimately Crutcher's agenda swamps his characters and their stories, resulting in a book that is more like a set of talking points for freedom of speech than one that, like Eddie's cherished Warren Peece, will inspire YAs to stand up and do battle. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Censorship Sucks!
By Jarrod T Thompson
I began this book thinking Crutcher had finally lost it, writing about a dead person who hangs around to help out his grieving friend, but then Crutcher threw a curve and I discovered the book is about censorship.
Chris Crutcher is a hero to adults who believe that the only way to edify our childeren is allow them to be free-thinking beings who can make their own determination of what is "good" or "bad" in literature or in life. The important thing is that our kids read, and if that means they have to read books like Crutcher's where if you count bad words and taboo plot topics, you will be worn out after the first chapter, then, so be it.
Crutcher makes lots of good points in this novel, and I will respect the review readers out there enough to let you read the book to see what I mean.
My only disappointment is that Crutcher didn't give me some publicity on page 226 when listing authors who were banned from a library in the novel. No respect. Story of my life.
I recommend this book for teens who have been a part of some of the censorship battles that have been going on all over our nation, especially the last 4-5 years. I also recommend this book to teens who have no adult in their life who gives them the respect that a young adult deserves.
I recommend this book for adults who fight for the rights of our teens to read what they like to read.
DISCLAIMER:
This book is not for everyone. There is no profanity in this book. There are, however, subtle plot references from the fictional fictional book Warren Peece that mention taboo issues which are not appropriate in the minds of those who believe solving problems can only be done by telling our youth what is righteous and moral, and never discussing any other viewpoints, or never allowing our kids to take what they have been taught at home and in life, read the offending literature, and make their own determinations based on their own rational, well thought out thoughts.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
A lot of Speeches!
By A Customer
I was so happy when I heard there was a new Chris Crutcher book coming out. I loved Sarah Byrnes so much, and Whale Talk too. In this book, there are two friends named Eddie and Billy. Billy is like the one person who sees all the good in Eddie and knows how to talk to him. Eddie's father dies, and then Billy dies too, and Eddie stops talking. There is a Christian minister named Reverend Tartar who wants to baptize Eddie. The reverend is also against a Chris Crutcher book in one of the school classes. The best part of the book is Billy talking to Eddie after he is dead. He's very funny. What is not as good is how bad a guy the author made Tartar. He is so evil, and to have this evil guy be the person against the Crutcher book seemed kind of unfair. He is like the worst reverend ever and is a racist, too. There were also way too many speeches in this book, especially at the end. There were speeches in church and speeches at the school meeting and even a short speech by Chris Crutcher where he said he agreed with another speech. I thought all the speeches hurt the book. All in all, this is an okay book, but not nearly as good as Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
The Pitcher, The Stone, The Sledding Hill
By Word Teacher
Chris Crutcher does some very good things in The Sledding Hill. His main point about the availability of literature to young people is exceptionally well taken, and for a good chunk of the novel he writes deftly, especially of the friendship between Billy and Eddie. Yet as I came to the conclusion, I found myself thinking more and more of what Cervantes has Sancho Panza say this in Don Quixote:
"Whether the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it bodes ill for the pitcher."'
That is, no matter how fiercely one might agree with Crutcher's politics, by book's end it feels as if the stone of polemic [According to Wordnet 2.0, not just an argument, but also a "writer who argues in opposition to others (especially in theology)"] had seriously cracked the vessel of the narrative.
To illustrate, I point straight to the first pair of teen reviews here at Amazon. What's especially great about these reviews is how fair they are. There is nothing in them that come close to criticizing the book as anti-Christian. Instead, the teens raise other, more legitimate reservations. Leave it to the kids to make the most astute observations about teen literature.
One young critic points out the novel's many speeches. He or she is absolutely right. In fact, over the last thirty-five pages or so, speeches dominate The Sledding Hill - Eddie's at church, various people at a critical school board meeting, even a short one by Chris Crutcher himself (via the Edmund Morris technique from the Reagan biography of making himself a character in his own story) at that same board meeting.
Any novelist who creates a plot that demands a lot of speechmaking does so at his or her own narrative risk. For me, the effect was to stress the political and polemical at the expense of the emotional. It risks having young readers skim at the very moment when you want them emotionally engaged. When the young reviewer said he or she lost interest as the book went along, I understood why. Speeches, no matter how good, are still speeches.
I also found the teen review on the mark when it points out how detestable a guy Crutcher (the author, not the character) has made his antagonist, the Reverend Tarter. Though the text pointedly ascribes "good" intentions to this fundamentalist religious leader/high school teacher who spearheads the charge against a mythical Crutcher novel, the fact remains that the man is an intolerant bigot far to the right of even real life Revs. Falwell and Robertson. Tarter preaches an abhorrent brand of Christianity that even these conservatives never would. He turns our stomachs by espousing the most vile of racial theologies (how African-Americans are black because they hold the sign of Cain). Across town in his public high school classroom, Tarter's discipline methods border on child abuse. As for his views on literature, they are extreme to the maximum. Tarter doesn't just want to bar certain novels from the classroom. He wants to take them from your local public library, too.
Surely people like Tarter exist in real life. In fact, they seem preternaturally attracted to wanting to decide who its okay for the rest of us to sleep with and what literature is okay for the rest of us to consume. The problem with Tarter as a character in this novel isn't that he isn't real. It's that with this Darth Vader of a villain, Crutcher overstacks his deck. And overstacks it and overstacks it, until the opposition crumbles under its own sick and twisted weight.
Granted, the strategy works to a degree. But at the same time it raises uncomfortable echoes of the identical tactics of the very people Crutcher seeks to confront, when they try to prove (however disingenuously) that their beliefs are true. That is, they hold up the best of their point of view and contrast it with the worst of anyone else's. This may be an excellent way to score debating points, but it begs a key question. Why be reluctant to engage in a serious and thoughtful discussion with a serious and thoughtful opponent? Surely there are some reasonable things to discuss when it comes to the appropriateness of certain books for certain schools or classrooms. In hypothetical political terms, it's as if President Clinton chose to debate David Duke instead of John McCain. Victory against Duke would be assured, but a one-on-one with McCain would a whole lot more interesting.
There's a lot more to talk about with this ambitious novel, including Crutcher's self-insertion into the text and his decision to have the banned novel in question be a self-penned work called Warren Peece (either the apex of cleverness or the nadir of hubris) and the Sebold-esque technique of having a dead narrator.
That discussion could be interesting, but I don't think it would affect my overall sense of The Sledding Hill. That is, adults who've had it up to here with stupid book challenges may well respond with cheers as Crutcher joins Richard Peck, Nat Hentoff, Nancy Garden, and so many others in fighting the good fight. But I strongly suspect that many teens might not share the enthusiasm for the story, regardless of how in synch they might be with the message. Making a great point is a great thing, and it might make for a great sermon, but it doesn't necessarily make for a great novel.
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