| Title | : | My Brother's Keeper |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0786851740 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780786851744 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 192 |
| Publication | : | First published June 9, 2005 |
My Brother's Keeper Reviews
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An excellently written novel!
The novel follow a young boy named Toby as he tried to keep his family from falling apart. His little brother has reverted to hiding under his blanket and sucking his thumb and his older brother is delving into drugs. Toby fights desperately to cover up for his brother and spare his mother and more heart break.
The novel was well written and engaging. The writing is emotional and the characters are real and believable. -
If a gun introduced in the first act must go off in the 2nd, when should the mint rookie Stargell baseball card introduced on p11 get stolen by the titular substance abusing brother?
I was on the fence about Cut, but really liked both Sold and Purple Heart, so I had high hopes for this one. I'm going to put it down for myself but push on teens that don't know Chekhov. -
man, disappointing after
Cut. not bad, but the innovative style of her debut book was put aside in exchange for a kind of boring narrative about three boys, drugs, and alcohol.
and if i had to read one more line about looking at the stargell baseball card, i was going to throw something. maybe the book. it was such a short book and it took me forever to read because frankly, i was bored. really, really bored.
which is so sad. because i really loved her first book, and i don't want to write her off. hopefully her next book comes out fast, and it focuses on girls instead of boys with absent fathers and depressive mothers. -
While this book is the second written by Patricia McCormick, it is the fifth I have read. For me, it did not quite equal the power of the other's written and, while certainly a pertinent and serious topic, did not really grab me like her other books. This novella is about a middle child in a crumbling American family. Toby's parents are divorced, his younger brother Eli is rejecting reality and not maturing, while his older brother, Jake, is falling apart because of a drug addiction and hanging with the wrong crowd. Toby is traumatized in a way by all of this and struggles to figure out his role, position, responsibility in all of this. Certainly, this is a relevant point of view in today's society.
However, McCormick seems to decide to take it to the next level with Toby struggling with early greying hair, potential girlfriend issues, making the baseball team, and some more challenges. While these are all realistic to a 9th-grade kid today, it seems too much for 175 pages and draws from the bigger issues, as Toby never really comes to terms with all these issues. McCormick makes much of the hair early on, but then dismisses it as a bit of humor in the end. She could have left that out and still been effective in telling the story of a pre-teen challenged with real-life issues.
Still, it is a good read and one that I would recommend to young readers entering their teenage years. -
Intriguing story about a middle child trying to "help" his older brother while he watches him fall into a bad friendship, get into alcohol and drugs, and give up playing baseball.
Interesting to see how co-dependency forms in a person out of their need to "love" and "protect" the ones they care about while struggling at the same time with all of their own pent up anger towards the one they are trying to protect. -
My Brother's Keeper was a very fast and easy book to read. The entire time I was waiting for something big to happen...nothing surprising ended up happening. I personally feel like the story could have talked more about what was going on with his brother
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I remember liking it at the time. I found it when I was cleaning my room
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sucked so mid.
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Toby has a passion and a big problem. His passion is baseball. He works part time for Mr. D. so he can earn money to buy baseball cards, especially players for his beloved Pittsburgh Pirates. He even makes his high school baseball team as a backup catcher. Not too bad for a freshman brainiac who is a year younger than his classmates. The cute girl on the softball team even smiles at him. Now if he could just get through Nurse Wesley's classes on human sexuality without dying of embarrassment, school would definitely be looking up.
At home, though, things are falling apart faster than he can pick them up and put them back together again. Ever since his dad moved to California and he had to leave his old home and neighborhood, Toby has tried to hold his family together. He's worried his mom might slip back into the funk that left her in bed for weeks. Throwing out the American Express bills and ordering three magazines for a chance to win one million dollars, though, might not have been the best plan. He wants to be the wise older brother for Eli, but how do you answer your younger brother's question about the Easter Bunny? Toby's biggest problem is his oldest brother, Jake. Jake slips out at night and comes back later and later. He's dropped off the baseball team to hang out with a known drug dealer. No matter how much Toby cleans up the messes and sprays orange citrus scent, it is not enough to cover over the odor of pot.
Patricia McCormick hits a homerun with My Brother's Keeper (Hyperion Paperbacks 2005). Baseball and hormones collide in Toby's life as he struggles to make sense of his family. I found myself laughing out loud at parts. Toby can be quite funny, intentionally or not. At other times my heart ached for him. He felt he had to solve problems by himself that are simply too big for one thirteen-year-old to take on alone. Slowly, Toby realizes that he is not alone and that he can reach out to ask for help.
Published on my blog at
http://kaymcgriff.edublogs.org/2012/0... -
Reviewed by Long Nguyen for TeensReadToo.com
A brother's love is a brother's love: one of the many truths to life and family. In MY BROTHER'S KEEPER, Patricia McCormick tells a sharp tale of the often too-complex relationships between brothers, and the unspoken feelings and subtleties of such a fragile thing.
Toby idolizes his big brother Jake. Jake's the typical big brother figure; cool, funny, charming, and the school baseball team stud. But things don't always turn out to be as great as they appear on the surface. Internally, there are struggles. Toby's father has left their family to search his fortune elsewhere and has seemed to cease all contact with them. His mother is distant and has taken a stance of resignation. And to complicate the situation even more so, inevitably past Toby's endurance, Jake has fallen into a rut he cannot get out of. The world of drugs.
Now Jake doesn't seem to be around as much anymore. He leaves the house, returning in the middle of the night faded and disillusioned, leaving the responsibility up to Toby to clean things up, make everything seem fine, and to smooth away the creases.
But when Jake finally goes too far, will it be up to Toby to decided how to handle things? Will he rat his brother out, breaking the cardinal rule of the big-brother/little-brother relationship, trespassing on regions of brotherhood Toby has never touched upon?
McCormick creates a completely believable and down-to-earth narrative of internal struggles in the mind of a growing boy's problems in not only the broader family unit, but also the profound nuances of the complicated structure of kinship between siblings. Not only that, but she manages to keep it lighthearted at the right moments, as well as comedic at others.
Cheers to P.M. -
Thirteen-year-old Toby Malone watches in despair as his older brother, once a star athlete, travels down a path of ruin, becoming increasingly involved with drugs. Not wanting to upset his recently divorced mother, who is already overwhelmed with problems, Toby remains silent about Jake's addiction, and in effect becomes his brother's "keeper," making excuses for Jake when he disappears into the night and comes home stoned. When Jake's friends make a mess in the house, Toby cleans it up, and when Jake quits the baseball team, Toby doesn't tell. The one time Toby attempts to take control of Jake's problem by flushing a bag of marijuana down the toilet, Jake retaliates by stealing and selling Toby's most prized possession. Tension mounts as Jake's activities get wilder and more dangerous and Toby starts to slowly give up. Until everyone takes things a little too far.
This book connects to everyone who's ever kept a secret they probably shouldn't have. Toby's feelings are fairly common so he's relate able as well. Anyone who's in their own world would connect to the main characters as well. Basically, everyone will connect to some thing in it.
I really liked this book. I gave it four out of five stars. It gave good incite and refreshing creativity but at the same time it was kind of sad. I would recommend this book to all teenagers. -
Toby lives with his mother and his two brothers, one is older and his name is Jake and the baby brother is Eli. Their father left them and moved to California and they have not heard from him since. The mother does her very best to support her family but with her job and stress she looses track of her children who are left on their own a lot of the time. Jake gets into drugs and is not the person he use to be at all. Jake, Toby and their father use to love baseball especially the Pirates. Toby now collects baseball cards and is trying out for the high school baseball team as a freshman. But Jake who was a star player will not play because he is mixed up with drugs and drinking. We follow Toby as he takes on more responsibility and has to make decisions about how he will react.
I really enjoyed this book because it is a great representation of what drugs can do to a family and leaving your kids on their own can lead to some bad choices that parents might not find out about until their child is in too deep to get out very easily and the consequences of their actions become very serious. The fact that Toby is our narrator is amazing because as a reader you can see how drugs and these addictive substances really work and how they can affect others who are not even partaking of the substances but are only affected by it and many of the choices that they have to make. -
This is another book about family, it involved the idea of abandonment, drug addiction and family relationship. Toby Malone is the protagonist of this book, her father's adandonment caused the family into chaos. The mother was depressed; and his older brother Jake chose to take drugs to anesthetize himself from the pain. As one of the member in the family, Toby was the "middle person" between his mother and brother. He had to make sure mother is okay and also had to keep Jake's secrets from his mother.
This book is similar to "After" by Kristin Harmel, they both illustrated the family problems when there's one member lost or left.But in this case, the father left the family in purpose, but the father in the other book died in accident. Overall, these books really show an idea: Family is the thing that bonds everyone together. To me, family is my everything. I can give up everything but my family, they are so important to me. No matter what I did, how i behave, who I am, my parents are always by my sides. They might get angry at me or sometimes misunderstand me, but never leave me alone. -
Patricia McCormick's main charachter, Toby Malone has the weight of the world on his shoulders. His dad left the family and now Toby is trying to hide from his mom and everyone else that his older brother, Jake is hanging out with some pretty shady guys, drinking and doing drugs. Toby also has some self esteem problems, what with being a teen and having some premature gray hairs, a freshman on the baseball team and liking Martha McDowell. His mom works all the time and has just begun to see the Food King, leaving Jake in charge while she is out. Jake quits the baseball team and gets deeper and deeper into drugs, skipping school, stealing Toby's baseball card for money and letting the cat out of the house. His little bother Eli, almost gets hit on the highway looking for the cat and the police arrest Jake for driving under the influence. Now his mom gets involved and Toby is able to confess all that he has been doing to shield her from Jake and his drugs. A compelling book, teens will love this!
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Started a couple different times. Did not grab me in beginning so I put down several times. Finally determined to finish and glad I did.
Typical story of middle child, father left family, struggling single mom. Couple twists are drug abuse problems with older brother. I liked the inner monologue of the MC. He dud use the number 185 way to much tho "heat beating 185 times per minute", looked for aomething 185 times...just used that number to express exaggeration way too much especially in end of book. Threw in several plot elements I did not think were needed-Prematurely gray hair for 13 yr old?? what? The little 8 yr old brother was written more like a helpless 4 year old...all in all the story was interesting and different. Made you think of how you would deal with similar situations if you were 13 again...wish there would have been more help or intervention at school level for these kids. Felt like they had no one. ..would have liked to know more about Mr. D or focused more on him and the resource he could have been to MC. Would recommend to upper elementary kids.
