Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher is about the Cutter High School Mermen, an unlikely swim team of misfits trying to earn their letters. The team is put together by The Tao Jones, better known as TJ, one of the three mixed-race people in his town, and coached by a teacher who started the team to avoid having to be the assistant wrestling coach. Along with being an unlikely group of athletes, the swimmers don’t even have a pool of their own. They swim in a too-small pool at a local rec center. They also face the harassment of a town where football rules everything and star players never move on from their high school glory.

Whale Talk is worth reading, and then it’s worth reading again. It tackles race relations (TJ’s parents are white, as is most of the population of his small Washington state town), the obsession over high school athletics, drugs, violence… but Crutcher does it with a light touch and an appealing, realistic, teenage narrator.

Reviews by Students:

Review by a student in Virginia

Reviews by Adults:

Teenreads.com review
Review at a Pennsylvania library

Related Links:

Allconsuming page about the book (Not YA specific)
Booksense.com interview with Chris Crutcher about Whale Talk
Chris Crutcher, hero or villain?
Detroit News article about a ban on Whale Talk being lifted
Parents question language in Whale Talk (St. Joseph, Missouri article from 2001)

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