Overview

""...engaging and meaningful..."" -School Library Journal ""...[a] stunner of a book..."" -Publishers Weekly Almost fourteen and a freshman in high school, Stevie Farr is a serious and talented cross-country runner. She is able to run nearly ten miles now and is the only freshman on the girls' varsity track team. Though her father keeps promising to clock her exact mileage with his car, he always seems too tired to go out again after taking her younger brother Robby to ice hockey practice and games. Stevie knows her father has not felt well since he had a serious operation the past summer-in fact she suspects he's feeling worse all the time-but she is unable to accept this as an excuse and feels he's being unfair to her. Her mother considers getting good grades more important than making a team and is too busy to clock Stevie anyhow. If Stevie can come in first in the 3.2 mile race at the big regional running conference, her team stands a chance of winning the meet. As she trains, she dreams of impressing the good-looking, sympathetic coach of the boys' track team. She also plays a game with herself: if she wins, Daddy lives; if she loses, he dies. Told honestly and directly by Stevie, the events of her fourteenth year, in which she comes to terms with pain and grief, acknowledges her own emergent sexuality, and falls gently in love with a boy on the track team, draw the reader close to Stevie as she moves along the uneven road to maturity.

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""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 ""Harlan has done an excellent job describing the tensions of a family in crisis."" -Booklist

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