Book Review: Chinese Handcuffs

Title: Chinese Handcuffs

Author: Chris Crutcher

Date: 1989

Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell

ISBN: 0-440-20837-8

Length: 220 pages

Quote: “When people ask, I tell them that you escaped back into the universe by your own hand.”

Dillon and Jennifer are teen athletes with terrible secrets. Dillon’s brother committed suicide while Dillon was watching. Jennifer is regularly abused by her stepfather. Sports are the medications of their choice. More effectively than pills, sports reduce their consciousness of pain to bearable levels long enough for them to do things to improve their lives. (One of the things they do is write out their feelings in the form of unsendable letters, like the one Dillon addresses to his brother, quoted above.)

Before he fell off his left-wing platform and started injecting pro-gay and anti-Christian messages into novels aimed at high school readers, Chris Crutcher was good at mixing sports coaching with life coaching. In Chinese Handcuffs, as in Stotan, he was at the peak of his form. Chinese Handcuffs hits hard, hits only its legitimate targets, and encourages teenagers who have Big Problems without giving unnecessary offense to anyone else. It and Stotan were the books that made Crutcher’s writing career.

Even so, does Chinese Handcuffs belong in the Children’s Room, even on the Young Adult Shelf? The characters are young, all right. The contents of the story aren’t graphic in the way real pornography would be, but the descriptions of rape, murder, and suicide are explicit enough that a fourth-grader who stumbled across this book would know what’s going on. That’s a good thing for troubled teenagers who may be reading on a fourth-grade level; it’s not so good if the book is going to be kept in the same room with The Cat in the Hat. Even for sixteen-year-olds who’ve been lucky enough to keep their emotional “innocence,” who find it upsetting to read about the peaceful deaths of old dogs, Chinese Handcuffs may be too raw.

Well…when this novel came out, I was well into my twenties; I’d talked a few people through crises but had never been raped or seriously beaten, and some scenes in this book still made me queasy. At the same time, I knew a fourteen-year-old who’d shared some of Jennifer’s experiences, who recommended Chinese Handcuffs to anyone who thinks he or she wants to know why some teenagers live in foster homes. Let’s just say that this is not a book you’d read for sheer pleasure. It’s a book you’d read if you want to help yourself or someone else cope with pain.

Posted on September 28, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book Tags incest, rape, suicide, young adult novel