In the middle of it…Deadline

I’m currently listening to Chris Crutcher’s Deadline on CD. I am a HUGE Chris Crutcher fan so I could not resist picking this one up.

The summer before his senior year of high school, Ben Wolf finds out that he has just about a year left to live. Ben refuses medical treatment and keeps his illness a secret from his friends and family. Somehow, he has always known that his life wouldn’t be a long one. Ben decides to live the life he has left full throttle. To start, he gives up cross country stardom for football and asks out his dream girl.

Now that I’m moving past the narrator’s tendency to give the male characters very nasally voices, I’m really getting into the book. I just finished the part about the Homecoming Game and he definitely redeemed himself there. The reading was so exciting I was ALMOST paying more attention to the story than to the road!

I’m pretty sure that I’ll be bawling as I get closer to the end of the book but at least I think I know how it turns out. Ben’s thinking about the legacy he’ll leave behind has definitely got me thinking about my own life. What would YOU do if you only had a year left to live? How would you want to be remembered? Leave us a comment and let us know!