Catch

  

What a fantastic start to my traditional (since last year) read-through of the CBCA Young Adult Notables list! I knew as soon as I began Sarah Brill's Catch that I was going to like it. It has a quite bizarre premise: over the summer holidays, sixteen year old Beth has grown tall and hot, and she's also developed an unexpected gift -- she can anticipate when someone is going to fall, and she can catch them. At first her strange ability is a secret. She can tell when a catch is coming because she starts to feel nauseous, then she's compelled to run to the location where she positions herself, and confidently, competently, no matter how heavy or awkward the person or how far they're falling, she catches them. 

Some falls are deliberate, and Brill doesn't sugar coat this reality; some (most) are accidental -- kids falling out of trees, a collapsing scaffold. But Beth has other problems to deal with, like her crush on neighbour Etienne, who for the first time seems to like her back, and her slightly older sister Meg, who is pregnant (for ages I thought the book would end with Beth 'catching' Meg's baby, but it doesn't). As more and more people find out about Beth, her life becomes more complicated.

Brill gives us a first person narrator in Beth, but she also deploys a technique of reporting a lot of conversations indirectly, rather than in direct dialogue, which gave the story an interesting, slightly flattening feeling which I enjoyed. I suppose Catch is magic realism? Brill definitely thinks through all the real world implications of Beth's unlikely gift (for one thing, she becomes amazing at basketball). Her mysterious ability is never explained; it just is. My only quibble is that the novel didn't really resolve, it just kind of... finished. Perhaps there is a sequel on the way, and Brill has left it deliberately open-ended? Despite this niggle, I loved Catch and I hope it makes the shortlist.