Deadline by Chris Crutcher

Deadline by Chris Crutcher Review

            Let me start out with this: Deadline is about a kid with a terminal illness.  It can only end in one way so if you don’t want to cry, don’t bother picking it up. 

Ben Wolf is diagnosed with a very aggressive blood disease at the beginning of his senior year of high school.  He opts not to tell his family about his problem so that he can have his final year, and I mean final, as “normal” as possible.  Wolf joins football so that he can experience being a hero.  He causes problems in his history class with the teacher every day in the class.  And he finally gets the courage to ask out the girl of his dreams.  All the while, Ben is holding onto the deep secret of his slowly ending time line.

Throughout the book, Ben learns of many other people’s secrets, including one that involves him in a major way.  He tries to juggle everything in his life; his crazy mother, struggling father, football star brother, girlfriend, town drunk, and of course, his terminal illness.

I really enjoyed reading this book.  It was well done and very interesting.  It offered a new point of view on life.  If I had only a year to live, I wouldn’t even bother going to school.  I would travel the world and experience everything that I could.   To think that this kid, who only had a year to live, decided to live it out in school, baffles me.  He lived his life to the fullest and never left his small town of Trout, Idaho.  This was the first book that I’ve read by Chris Crutcher.  I am going to continue reading his books and I suggest that you do the same.

As for the book, I give Deadline by Chris Crutcher four and a half stars out of five (even though I balled like a baby at the end).