Works Cited

Crutcher, Chris. Whale Talk. N.p.: n.p., 2001.


Web link
Netscape. Open Directory- Society- Issues- Child Abuse. 18 Jan. 2008 http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Children,_Youth_and_Family/ Child_Abuse/.

Child Welfare Information Gateway. Defining Child Abuse and Neglect. 18 Jan. 2008 .

Child Abuse

Child Abuse is a serious problem in America. Many children can become severely maimed or injured by physically abusive parents and some very young children are even killed. A blue ribbon signifies child abuse. Child Abuse can be emotional, physical, and/or sexual in nature, and most occurs within one's own family, at a school, or in some other situation with a trusted adult present. The US and the UK rank lowest in keeping their children safe from harm.



Child abuse occurs most commonly in single-parent families, and it comes in 3 forms. Physical, emotional, and sexual. Neglect is found in physical and emotional, and is the most commonly found abuse in the United States.



Abused children can become depressed, anxious, develop personality disorders, experience alienation or withdrawal, severe physical disabilities (depending on severity of physical abuse), criminal or antisocial behavior, delinquency, aggressive behavior, and further abusing their own children or spouses.



Child abuse can occur by the parent or guardian for many reasons. It can happen because the parent was abused as a child, they have some psychotic illness, the family is going through a lot of stress (this can lead to neglect more than anything else) such as divorce or a downward shift in income, and commonly found (and mentioned in Whale Talk as having happened to the main character, T.J.,) drug abuse by a parent.



Most abused children experience a long-term post traumatic stress disorder from their experiences, and while this does not necessarily include flashbacks, it can acclude such things as attatchment disorder, and leads to persistent sadness, helplessness, and a disconnect from others around them. It can also lead to isolation, or a search for a rescuer.

Child abuse (though this is rarely tackled in Whale Talk directly) in America is handled by Child Protective Services. They are an organization that can intervene and support families or go as far as to take a child away from a parent, though that action has been criticised as more harmful than good in some situations.

Child abuse can also lead to something known as emotional dysregulation. It makes an emotional response odd or very heightened from the norm, such as an incredible rage over a broken plate, or incredible joy over something very minor or even bad.

As I said in the introduction, a blue ribbon signifies child abuse prevention. It is a loop, similar to pink for breast cancer, yellow for troop support, or the most commonly known, red, for aids.

So, as you can see, child abuse is a serious problem in America. It can lead to death, serious injury, and so many degrees of psychotic trauma. It can ruin a life.

6 Traits of Writing

Ideas- The book is filled with great info about child abuse, and the author seems to have done his research. My only two complaints in this area stem from Dan Hole, who seems far too stereotypical and underdeveloped, and the fact that the author has too many similar backstories about child abuse. T.J.'s thoughts are interesting and I can relate to them, however. The main points of my problems with this can be seen on two of the comments that I made.

Organization- He organizes it about as well as he can, considering it's a published book. The chapters he has organized it into are really non-notable, and the only way you realize they are there are the bold numbers at the beginning of each section. The paragraphs are each relating to a slightly different subject, and overall it's very well organized.

Voice- Crutcher's voice booms from within T.J. His opinions on child abuse, school athletics, arrogance, hunting, and everything inbetween come out in T.J.'s thoughts. He has wonderful descriptions of each character, and, though similar, the backgrounds of child abuse are interesting in their own ways.

Word Choice- It was avergae, other than Dan Hole there wasn't anything shocking or amazing in terms of word choice. The theme of whales talking had some interesting figurative language in relating it to the overall theme, but the novel in and of itself wasn't really anything incredible as far as language.

Sentence Fluency- Again, it's what you would expect from a published book. Crutcher has flowing sentences that don't feel choppy and you don't notice anything odd as you read from sentence to sentence.

Conventions- The editor got everything, if there was anything. He's a published author and he's done everything correctly. Crutcher has done everything perfectly, and if anything was off, it was really unnoticable to most of the people who will be reading his books.

Presentation- It's a published work, and the cover really does show mostly what it's about- kind of a blurred over letter jacket with someone running in it. The person running clearly isn't supposed to be the main character, you can tell by the color of the skin. The summary on the back is nice and gets the reader interested.

Plot Summary

T.J Jones, (real name The Tao Jones) is a young japanese-black-german american who goes to Cutter High school. He is sick of the athletic program taking control over everything in the school, and thinks the school shows too much bias and that a letter jacket shouldn't mean everything. Simet, his teacher and friend, wants to start a swimming team, and after hearing about T.J's ability in swimming, asks him to help him start one. T.J. is reluctant at first, but comes up with some ideas and says he'll do it. He sees a boy named Chris being picked on whose brother died because he is wearing his brother's letter jacket, and T.J. thinks what a great idea it would be if he could get him a letter jacket. He puts up flyers advertising the swim team, and gets responses from people who aren't very great swimmers, but he doesn't have much other choice and he thinks that if he could get them letter jackets he could completely uck the system. They practice in the local gym pool and aren't very good, but they make up letter requirements that look hard, but, in reality, are rather easy. They go on to get last in every meet, and everyone does get a letter, except for T.J., who purposely lost the state meet because he wanted to stop Cutter from winning the All-Sport trophy.

Some Characters

T.J.- A boy of very mixed race who is adopted and brought up by a caring couple. He is an advocate for gun conrtrol and doesn't like arrogant athletes.

Chris- A slow boy who was brain damaged as a very young child by his mother's boyfriend. Respects his brother Brain greatly, though Brain has died.

Andy Mott- A tall boy who has a prosthetic leg. He lost it as a child when his mother's boyfriend tied him up like a dog by his leg too tight. He is very sarcastic.

Simon- A very large boy with low self-esteem. He is not doing very well in biology and wants his mother dead for some reason.

Dan Hole- A very stereotypical nerd who uses an intense vocabulary.

Tay-Roy- A former bodybuilder, he is a great athlete who is just too largely built to be a good swimmer.

Jackie Craig- He is described as the "most average and unnoticable boy you'd ever see" and he keeps very quiet.

Dan Hole

I was kind of disappointed in the character of Dan Hole: Crutcher didn’t show a fleshed out character, he showed a piece of comic relief that doubled as a stereotypical nerd. He likes to use big words that nobody understands, he’s always busy calculating everything, and he can’t help sending fake pictures of musclemen to random girls across the internet for attention.

It was odd: He spent so much time giving everyone a back-story, and here comes Dan Hole, who almost has nothing to hide and nothing of interest, and you always knew everything that was coming. Now, while I earlier argued that everyone’s motives seemed to be child abuse, that doesn’t mean the characters just SHOULDN’T HAVE MOTIVES. That’s even worse.

The ten-pushup routine, I have to say, was funny the first few times, but the fact that Icko made him go out into the snow for using a decent vocabulary sort of seems like the wrong message to be sending. Now, know that I’m the last to think that good, moral values are above all in society, but I think the fact that so few kids read books at all and that some of the people reading the book can relate to Dan Hole because they’re actually taking the time to read it might make him sort of a walking statement of mocking towards them and that maybe a good vocabulary isn’t such a bad thing,

While sadly, admittedly I find myself a bit relatable to Dan Hole, and a cross of him and some aspects of T.J. describe me perfectly, I think it’s in part because I think I’m somewhat intelligent, and nothing to do with his life story or how he views the world, of which little to no insight was given. He just seems so one-dimensional as a character, and Crutcher tried to turn him into a somewhat major character.

I was just overall disappointed with Dan Hole as a character. He’s relatable because of his basic character traits, you can connect with him or laugh at him because of his nerdiness, and the quirks that he has seem to come right out of most low-grade internet message boards. While Crutcher attempts to describe a character everybody knows, he does little to make those of us who can relate to him feel like anyone will understand us any better because of his input.

Overdoing it

While Chris Crutcher did a good job of talking about child abuse and the way it can affect people, I think he overdid how much of an impact it has upon the world. It seemed like almost every character in the entire novel had some back-story relating to child abuse: Mott, Carly, Barbour, in some ways T.J., Heidi, Rich Marshall, and Chris, as well as from conversations on the bus, the possibility of Simon (he said he wanted his mom dead) so that’s a majority of the characters in the entire novel.

Now, I understand that he wanted to get a theme across. But people do have other motivations for being who they are: you can be a psychopathic one-legged anti-social guy with a nice streak and have had a perfectly normal upbringing with some other dark turns. It just seems like you were waiting for every character to reveal their histories with it, and it almost distracted from the story itself.

This isn’t to say I don’t believe it’s a widespread and serious problem; I just think he could have had some diversity in character backgrounds. It almost, sadly, dulled the shock of learning a character had a tragic past as it would in most novels, because almost everyone had one, if not a bad present as well. You just couldn’t help thinking the moment you found out Mott had something to hide that it was a strong possibility.

In most novels, there are only one, maybe two characters, with something real deep to hide, and it always flips how you view them on your head. Crutcher manages to show that doing the opposite makes the converse: give a ton of characters something to hide, you start to expect it and view them the same before and after. Maybe for T.J. it was something of a shock, but for the reader it becomes obvious where things are going before they begin.

I suppose it sort of shows something about young adult literature in general: If you’re going with a big theme, you have to have more subtleties than you do explosive shock, because the explosive shock itself becomes normal if it’s overplayed.

Child Abuse Theme Connections

The obvious theme of most of the book is child abuse, and how many of the characters deal with it, whether they are victims, abusers, people trying to help, or any combination of the three. Now, to me, most of it seems pretty accurate, not that I would know a whole lot about it. But I’ve been dealing with it in my own life, not directly but I know others who have, including someone rather close to me, so I’ve tried to help and I can connect with T.J. in some ways.

Chris Crutcher, to me, seems to miss some things as well; he relies too much on people falling into a “savior complex” and, while he describes some frustration in T.J. because he isn’t able to do much about it, and he also describes a lust for revenge rather well, my trouble relating to him is that he’s too deep into it. He knows too much and I suppose before I got into dealing with the people I know, I was fairly sheltered, and, to be honest, I still am. Not that Mr. Crutcher doesn’t have a right to do that, but it definitely gives me a disconnect from his characters.

Now, along with a savior complex, I think Chris Crutcher almost does more to enforce it than he does to help eliminate it (which, maybe it’s not worth eliminating, but you can meet some pretty screwed up people who failed their goals when they had one, so you can’t argue it’s something worth having in all cases) because he allows T.J. to help the little girl and sort of makes Mike Barbour look better in the end. He doesn’t give the sense that you do what you can to help, but you can’t fix anyone and you can’t change what happened to them. He’s saying you can cover things up, and if the wound isn’t too deep you can eventually pretend it was never there, which I have to disagree with.

He does a great job of showing how different people deal with it in different ways, like contrasting Mott and Mike Barbour or Carly Hudson. He shows the motives and ideas of people like Alicia and Rich Marshall, and showing it in action, as in Heidi. He shows how people become obsessed with saving, like the trauma that happened to T.J.’s father, but I think the best novel that dealt with saving anything was “Acceleration” by Graham McNamee. It showed something more of an natural want or need to be something of a hero or a savior to someone in everyone, something I relate to more than wanting make up for past mistakes.

I guess my point is, if there really is one, that while the novel does a great job of exploring the themes of the novel, unless you really know anything about it, it can go over people’s heads in a heartbeat.