Chinese Handcuffs
Crutcher, Chris
Advanced Placement -- Communication Arts (Jr)
This book is mainly about teen suicide. Dillon Hemingway (in high school) watches his older brother Preston kill himself with a pistol to the head. Preston's problems include drug addiction, handicapping himself through a motorcycle accident, and getting a high school girl pregnant. In addition, Preston and Dillon's family has split up, with the younger sister and mother moving out of the house.
A second plot also involves teen suicide. The star girl's basketball player, Jennifer, has been sexually abused by both her biological father and current stepfather. At one point, Jennifer feels the only way out is to kill herself, so she runs out of the middle of a basketball game to the top of a water tower where Dillon grabs her at the last moment and pulls her back from certain death. Dillon secretly plants a videocamera in Jennifer's bedroom, tapes a sexual encounter between Jennifer and her stepfather, and uses the tape to blackmail the man into leaving town.
If the main topics weren't so serious, I would have found parts of this book comical. The simplistic caricatures of the principal and girl's basketball coach were shallow. The main character, Dillon, is the medical trainer for the high school girl's basketball team. In this role he gives the girls rubdowns, massages, and other medical advice and support in their locker room. (Perhaps Dillon enrolled on the side in some medical correspondence classes? He probably had plenty of time to do this during one of his many 3-day suspensions from school and after he finished training for the triathlons he competed in.)
The title Chinese Handcuffs comes from the carnival fingertrap toy. The notion is that in order to solve your problems, sometimes you have to do the opposite of what you think should be done. (Now that's clear and useful advice for a teen! I wonder if this is what Preston was thinking when he shot himself in the head. 'I could either face my problems or do the opposite and blow my head off.' Crutcher never resolves how the term Chinese handcuffs relates to the main topic of the book -- teen suicide. The title appears to be just a clever term used to help sell books.)
Crutcher also sprinkles his novels with choice vocabulary throughout such as bitch, shit, shithead, bullshit, ass, asshole, hell, God damn, and bastard.
Because this book has the lowest reading level of any assigned high school books I've read so far, I went back to the documentation for the English AP exams to see if Chris Crutcher was among the over 165 recommended authors. Crutcher is not listed as a recommended author for either exam. Yet, Crutcher is one of Blue Valley's favorite authors with three of his books on their "Approved" list, Chinese Handcuffs for Jr AP students, Running Loose for Jr and Sr non-AP Communication Arts classes, and Stotan for freshman students.