Footfalls
A Novel
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Footfalls is a moving story about growing up, loving and losing, and finding your stride after heartbreak.
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About the Book
FOOTFALLS is the story of fourteen year-old Stevie Farr, whose much loved fahter is dying of cancer. While Stevie is coming to life as an adolescent – growing and developing both physically and emotionally – her father’s life is coming to an end.
As the star runner of her high school varsity, Stevie trains for an important race while playing a highly charged game based on superstition and magical wish fulfillment: if I win Daddy lives, if I lose he dies. But while Stevie’s time runs on, time is running out for her father.
Coursing the emotional landscape of Stevie’s cross-country race, laid out against the backdrop of her father’s illness, we watch a young person stretching and struggling to learn the painful but maturing lesson that no matter how much we care and how hard we try, some things in life are beyond our control. Like winning and living. Like losing and dying.
As winter turns to spring and buds burst along her jogging trail, Stevie experiences the healing that follows mourning. With the help of a sensitive and sympathetic guidance counselor and with the affectionate attention of an upperclass boy on the track team, she reconciles her father’s death with her own survival. Overcoming alienation from family and friends, Stevie lets herself feel once again the warmth of living and loving.
Endorsements
In Harlan’s stunner of a book, Stevie Farr deals with her awakening sexuality, her drive for achievement as a cross-country runner, and her father’s fatal illness. Handling the story honestly, the author gives it stature and grace, epitomizing Stevie as youth in all its awkward attempts to grow in understanding while suffering the convictions of guilt that only the truly innocent can feel.
Publishers Weekly
The author is perceptive about family relationships and is able to portray them with accuracy and sensitivity. Footfalls has the qualities that make a novel both engaging and meaningful: it’s fast-moving, true-feeling, and appropriate to its reader’s interests and abilities.
School Library Journal
[In Footfalls,] Harlan has done an excellent job describing the tensions of a family in crisis.
Booklist