Losers Bracket

Written by Chris Crutcher

Narrated by Tara Sands

When a family argument turns into an urgent hunt for a missing child, seventeen-year-old Annie Boots must do everything in her power to bring her nephew home safely. Chris Crutcher, the acclaimed and bestselling author of Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, shares a provocative story about family, loss, and loyalty that is perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds and Laurie Halse Anderson. The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books called Losers Bracket “Genuine and affecting.” 

When it comes to family, Annie is in the losers bracket. While her foster parents are great (mostly), her birth family would not have been her first pick. And no matter how many times Annie tries to write them out of her life, she always gets sucked back into their drama. Love is like that.

But when a family argument breaks out at Annie’s swim meet and her nephew goes missing, Annie might be the only one who can get him back. With help from her friends, her foster brother, and her social service worker, Annie puts the pieces of the puzzle together, determined to find her nephew and finally get him into a safe home.

Award-winning author Chris Crutcher’s books are strikingly authentic and unflinchingly honest. Losers Bracket is by turns gripping, heartbreaking, hopeful, and devastating, and hits the sweet spot for fans of Andrew Smith and Marieke Nijkamp.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780062822994

Chris Crutcher

Chris Crutcher has written nine critically acclaimed novels, an autobiography, and two collections of short stories. Drawing on his experience as a family therapist and child protection specialist, Crutcher writes honestly about real issues facing teenagers today: making it through school, competing in sports, handling rejection and failure, and dealing with parents. He has won three lifetime achievement awards for the body of his work: the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALAN Award, and the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award. Chris Crutcher lives in Spokane, Washington.

Reviews for Losers Bracket

[readinggeek451 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[sleahey_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.