Going for the Record

FROM THE CRITICS

Children's Literature - Peg Glisson

Soccer is Leah Weiczynkowski's life. All her hard work is finally paying off as she earns a spot on the Midwest Regional Team, with a shot at making the National Team. Driving home from the regional meet, her dad tells her while she has been gone he has been diagnosed with cancer and given three months to live. Shock, disbelief, denial, and anger fill the next couple weeks for Leah. Her father takes a turn for the worse while she's at Nationals and Leah makes the difficult decision to cut short her time there (greatly reducing her chances to make the team) to come home to be with and help care for her father. Well-drawn relationships and characters make this a poignant story of a teen's coming to terms with her father's and her own spirituality, her family, life, and death. Neither Leah nor her family are saints, but their love and underlying respect for each other allows them to accept the situation and help each other through it. The book is painfully honest as it details Leah's withdrawal from friends and soccer and her father's decline and pain. Yet overall, there is hopefulness as the Weiczynkowki's laugh, cry, and pray their way through these three months and as Leah and her mother begin to piece together their new life. The soccer angle provides a balance and escape from what might have become a maudlin story. 2004, Erdmans, Ages 12 up.

VOYA - Lucy Schall

Caught between the tensions of her father's illness and her Olympic soccer ambitions, seventeen-year-old senior Leah Weiczynkowski spends five months watching her father die and reevaluating her life. On the day that she tells him, her biggest fan, that she has qualified for the first step toward the Olympics, he tells her that he has terminal cancer. His choice is hospice. Helping her mother and comforting her father, she, like her father in the natural death process, daily battles denial and withdraws from life. Discovering that Luke, the boy she considered her buddy and workout partner, loves her, she rejects him. Her outstanding performance at the Olympic Training Center and multiple scholarship offers do not cure her father. He deteriorates, and Leah quits soccer too. After her father dies, she realizes that she loves Luke but still rejects the sport, which she feels robbed her of family time. With the support of her mother and friends, however, she is persuaded to play in a pick-up game and begins to resurrect the joy of her skill, competition, and life. Perhaps more powerful than Both Sides Now (Henry Holt, 2000/VOYA June 2000), this coming-of-age spiritual journey is a realistic, sensitive look at a strong family with deep faith, forced to make wrenching, practical decisions. Requiring a mature audience, it challenges each reader to consider the balance of his or her own life. Every counselor and hospice worker should have a copy. VOYA CODES: 5Q 4P J S (Hard to imagine it being any better written; Broad general YA appeal; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2004, Eerdmans, 217p., $8 Trade pb. Ages 12 to 18.

Alan Review - Jeanne M. McGlinn

The summer before her senior year in high school, everything is coming together for Leah Weiczynkowski's soccer aspirations. She makes the Olympic Developmental Program's regional team, is invited to a national camp, and is recruited by coaches at major universities. But her self-absorbed dedication to soccer is challenged when she learns her chief sup-porter, her father, has terminal pancreatic cancer with only three months to live. Leah and her family find themselves on a devastating path as they learn to cope with the illness. They go through fear and anger, denial, hope, bargaining, and resignation. They also have to watch as their father tries to cope with extreme pain and still maintain his sense of control and dignity. Swanson asks hard questions anyone facing suffering must ask. Why is this happening? How can someone deal with pain with dignity? How can people continue their lives faced by the loss of a loved one? How do we deal with the void in our hearts? This may seem to be a predictable novel, but Swanson's story leads us to empathize and to hope we might have their courage to deal with death and loss. 2004, Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 217 pp., Ages young adult.

School Library Journal

Gr 7 Up-Leah Weiczynkowski is a promising soccer player with Olympic aspirations. The summer before senior year, she learns that her beloved father has pancreatic cancer and only three months to live. Called "obsessed with soccer" by her mom, Leah isn't interested in parties, shopping, or hanging out with friends, and she regards Clay, an attentive male classmate, as a soccer trainer, not a boyfriend. She practices her sport intently and awaits phone calls from college coaches eager to recruit her. As her dad's illness progresses, the teen begins to feel selfish and guilty when family needs threaten to interrupt her schedule. Her first-person narrative conveys emotional vulnerability and growing self-reflection. Part of an extended Catholic family, Leah is comforted by her grandmother, who talks about the power of prayer. Her father's inexorable decline, including the arrival of hospice workers and a hospital bed in the sunroom, is portrayed with realism and pathos. With his death, Leah comes to recognize that soccer is just a game, that her relationship with Clay is important, and that what really matters is to make a difference in the world. This powerful novel leaves the outcome undefined, but there is no doubt that Leah has grown inestimably in her understanding of the value of relationships, in her ability to accept and grieve her father's death, and in her resolve to move ahead with living. A first-rate debut.-Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VT Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews