Amazon.com Review
No matter how hard he tries, Keegan Flannery just can't forgive himself. With no close friends to confide in and only a silent, broken father at home, Keegan torments himself daily with the belief that he is to blame for the dissipation of his once vibrant family. As the only person with his mother when she suffered a mental collapse, Keegan feels responsible for her decline, as well as the infant death of his twin, Michael. In a dark vision of his own beginning, he imagines choosing his life over Michael's, "Even when my hands pulled on his shoulders and pushed him down, away; even when I stood on his body and shoved myself up to be born, my brother never fought." Now Keegan, a devout Catholic, has decided that his short life is worth very little when weighed on the spectral scales of St. Michael the Archangel, his twin's patron saint. So instead of a party, he begins to plan a suicide for his 16th birthday. Only a curmudgeonly coach, a wild card wrestler named Nicky, and an acknowledged place on the school's underdog wrestling team stand between Keegan and all eternity. But will they be enough to encourage an underweight, overwrought wrestler who's lost his will to fight?
A deep, dense book full of contrasts between light and dark, and rich in religious and mythological symbol, St. Michael's Scales is not for the casual teen browser. But for those dedicated readers who champion Keegan through the bleak days before his birthday, the literary rewards are greatly satisfying. (Ages 13 and older) --Jennifer Hubert
From Publishers Weekly
Connelly's sophisticated first novel follows a teen consumed by guilt for the death of his twin, who died as an infant. Keegan plans to die the day before turning 16. He believes this will allow his twin, Michael, to return and repair their dysfunctional family. Set mostly in his "falling apart" Catholic high school with its "Wrong-Hearted Jesus" (a life-size statue of Jesus with his heart in the wrong place) and strange basement gym, Keegan's journey gets more complicated when he begins blaming himself for not helping his institutionalized mother. As penance, he joins the wrestling team, where he finds community, especially with Nicky Carpelli, who starves himself to wrestle at 105 pounds. Keegan worries that if he follows through with his plan to kill himself, he won't get to heaven, especially since he has no good deeds to put on the scale St. Michael will use to weigh his soul. Wrestling provides a good parallel both the weighing-in ritual and the inherent struggle. Keegan's memories of his family shoveling snow together or a lonely scene at home with his unavailable father and takeout pizza shed light on the depth of pain the boy and his family have internalized. While Keegan's ever-morphing delusions may be challenging to follow at times, the Catholic iconography and childhood flashbacks he intertwines with his narration, plus the surreal events, characters and setting, will likely draw readers into his world. Ages 12-up.
