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nancy@nancykeane.com
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Cross,
Gillian.
CHARTBREAKER
New York : Holiday House,
1987
IL YA
ISBN 0823406474
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Janis
Mary Finch, a sixteen-year-old living just outside London, hates her life.
She is no good in school, she’s constantly fighting with her mother, she
despises her future stepfather, and she has no idea what she wants to do
with her life. After a particularly bad fight with her mom, Janis
escapes to a local café. It is here that she meets the group
that will change her life. They invite her to sing in their band,
Kelp. Janis considers the offer and decides to leave school and her
family behind. Janis becomes simply Finch, a not-exactly-pretty singer
with a bad attitude. She clashes with Christie (short for Christopher),
the band’s accepted leader. He pushes and pushes Finch into his image
of what a rock singer should be. Finch and Christie develop a kind
of love-hate relationship. They love to spar, and they appear to
hate each other. But when they sing together, there is musical magic.
"When Christie’s answering bars came back, they made a link. An invisible
cord that tightened as we sang, drawing the next notes out of me.
And the next and the next. The audience felt it too and, for the
first time on that tour, they responded to us. There’s no mistaking
that alertness, that special silence. It lifted me up and up, so
that…I began to hear the blood thumping in my ears. And all the time the
space between me and Christie was shrinking and the charge was growing.
He is so still on stage that I was hardly aware of him moving. His
eyes stared at me almost without a blink and his body seemed to be the
single motionless thing at the centre of all the noise. But all the
time we drew nearer to each other, until we were together inside a bubble
of sound that cut us off from everyone else in the theatre."
Like I said…magic. The band experiences a meteoric rise to fame,
but, when things are starting to seem okay, tragedy strikes. Will
the band survive? What will happen between Finch and Christie?
Discover the answers when you read Chartbreaker, a tale of aggression,
depression, devastation, and, most importantly music, by Gillian Cross.
(Kelly Knight, knightkl@mailbox.sc.edu,
USC School of Library and Information Science, Columbia, SC) |
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SUBJECTS:
Rock music -- Fiction.
Family problems -- Fiction. |
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Permission is granted for the
noncommercial duplication and use of this resource, provided it is substantially
unchanged from its present form and appropriate credit is given.
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