From Amazon.com
Australian author
John Marsden's gripping suspense stories--with his signature shocking climaxes--have made him the
John Grisham of the young adult set around the globe.
Checkers, following this tradition, is the riveting story of a teenage girl who loses not only her family but her sanity when her father is suspected of participating in a financial scam--one that the media has traced to the highest levels of the Australian government. Telling the story in first-person flashbacks as the girl recuperates in a mental institution, Marsden symbolizes his protagonist's powerlessness by never revealing her name. The result is an eerie sense that she could be any teenager trying to understand her parent's cryptic behavior and motives. The only completely honest relationship the girl has is with her beloved dog Checkers, a gift from her father upon closing his most important deal. Checkers "wasn't the kind of dog you hug really tight, like a Labrador.... He had too much independence, too much pride," but he becomes the only source of comfort for the girl once the story breaks about her father's shady business practices. She never dreamed that the connection the reporters are searching for could be running around in her own backyard. Fraught with tension and political intrigue,
Checkers is an intelligent page-turner for teens. (Ages 12 and older)
--Jennifer Hubert
From Publishers Weekly
This determinedly grim novel is less compelling than most of the Australian writer's previous books (Letters from the Inside), even though it shares their angry energy and capacity to shock. The focus splits between teenage patients in a psychiatric ward and the family crisis that brought the unnamed female narrator there. It is an uneasy split, despite the energetic prose of the girl's diary entries: "Life seems so fragile. You walk down the centre of the highway, with the big trucks rushing past. They make the air shake. They blow you off your line." Her fellow participants in group therapy include an obsessive-compulsive, a male anorexic and a girl who thinks she has an animal living in her head. However, the narrator describes their activities rather than interacts with them, so they don't seem fully realized. She claims a deep friendship with the anorexic boy, for example, but he figures only slightly in the stories she tells. And although the narrator eventually works up the courage to break her long silence in group, readers never learn what her diagnosis is?only what happened to her. A heavy dose of Australian politics and corporate-speak in connection with the subplot about the girl's father weigh down the story line, but the pervasive sadness of the narration will make this worthwhile for teenagers who find solace in reading about hard times. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
