CCBC Booklists

CCBC Review:

Teenage Alton’s great Uncle Lester is a serious bridge player. He’s also taciturn, brilliant, and blind, memorizing and playing each hand with the assistance of a cardturner. With hopeful thoughts of inheritance, Alton’s mom eagerly accepts aging Uncle Lester’s offer to hire Alton for this role. Alton is resentful, but the complex, challenging card game soon has him intrigued. When Toni, Uncle Lester’s former cardturner, offers to teach Alton more about bridge he eagerly accepts, although he’s too shy to tell Toni he likes her and says nothing when his best friend asks her out. Years ago, Uncle Lester was in love with Toni’s grandmother, a smart, savvy bridge player who was already married and ended her life in an asylum, a victim of power, politics and cruelty. But there’s a bit of cosmic triumph in store for her and Uncle Lester both if Alton and Toni are willing to play along. There is plenty of bridge action in Louis Sachar’s unusual and entertaining novel, but it’s the human story that holds it fast, including two tales of love. Sachar cleverly gives information about bridge strategies in sections of text preceded by a graphic of a whale—narrator Alton’s way of indicating that what comes next may be as boring as those sections about whales in Moby Dick: Feel free to skip ahead. But some teens may find the mathematics and complexities of the game as fascinating as the hearts and minds of Sachar’s characters. ©2010 Cooperative Children’s Book Center

CCBC Age Recommendation: Age 13 and older
Age Range: Grades 6-8 (Ages 11-13) Grades 9-12 (Age 14 and older)
Format: Novel
Subjects: Blind and Visually Impaired People Competitions and Contests Love and Romance Math and Mathematicians Uncles
Diversity subject: Physical
On CCBC Booklists: Math Books You May Have Missed  Game On! Books About Games and Gaming 

Publisher: Random House
Publish Year: 2010
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780385736626
CCBC Location: Fiction, Sachar

Add To My List