Annie Boots is a gifted athlete. She is also a foster kid, one of the lucky ones with a stable, long-term placement. But she can't give up on her extremely disfunctional bio family, to the point of repeatedly sabotaging her athletic efforts because it might mean seeing her mother or sister more often. On the rare occasions that that works, things always go horribly wrong. Annie (and the other characters) is well-written and realistic, but her self-destructive behaviour made her hard for me to sympathize properly.

This is not a bad book. It may be a necessary one. But I didn't find it nearly as moving as most of Crutcher's other books. ( )

Chris Crutcher's social work background is obvious in this book, which is centered around a girl in long-term foster care with strong, if not healthy, ties to her biological family. Annie is a star basketball player who has been fortunate to be placed in a comfortably-off and caring long-term foster placement. One problem is that she can't let go of caring about her substance abusing and irresponsible mother and sister, and her young nephew, and whenever she sees them it's hard to recover. Another problem is that her foster father cares too much, specifically about her athletic achievements, and is therefore demanding and critical and clueless about her emotional state. On the positive side, Annie's foster mother and brother do understand her, and so do her social worker, therapist, best friend, and her mother's boyfriend. When Annie's nephew goes missing, all the problems come to the fore, but so does Annie's support system. At first it was disconcerting for Crutcher to have written in first person from a girl's point of view, but the path of the story is engaging enough so that ultimately it all works. ( )