My Brother's Keeper

by Patricia McCormick

When their father leaves, the Malone family falls into despair and the middle child, Toby, is suddenly left responsible for getting everyone back on track, especially his older brother, Jake, who he discovers is involved with drugs and, much like his father, drifting further away from those who love him due to it.

Genres: Young Adult, Realistic Fiction, Fiction, Contemporary, Family, Teen, Drama

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2005

About the author

Patricia McCormick is a journalist and writer. She graduated from Rosemont College in 1978, followed by an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1986 and an M.F.A. from New School University in 1999. Her first novel for teens was Cut, about a young woman who self-injures herself. This was followed by My Brother's Keeper in 2005, about a boy struggling with his brother's addiction and Sold in 2006. Her awards include the American Library Association Best Book of the Year, New York Public Library Best Book for the Teenage, and the Children's Literature Council's Choice.

She has written for The New York Times, Parents magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Ladies Home Journal, Town & Country, More, Reader's Digest, Mademoiselle, and other publications and has been an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an instructor of creative writing at the New School University. She lives in New York with two children, a husband, and two cats.

Reviews

[Ralph Gallagher · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellently written novel!

The novel follow a young boy named Toby as he tried to keep his family from falling apart. His little brother has reverted to hiding under his blanket and sucking his thumb and his older brother is delving into drugs. Toby fights desperately to cover up for his brother and spare his mother and more heart break.

The novel was well written and engaging. The writing is emotional and the characters are real and believable.

[Jessy · Rating 2 out of 5]

If a gun introduced in the first act must go off in the 2nd, when should the mint rookie Stargell baseball card introduced on p11 get stolen by the titular substance abusing brother?

I was on the fence about Cut, but really liked both Sold and Purple Heart, so I had high hopes for this one. I'm going to put it down for myself but push on teens that don't know Chekhov.

[Olivia Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Brother’s Keeper is about the Malone family. In this book Toby, Jake, and Eli’s dad abandons them when they are young due to him losing his job at a factory. He moved to California and stopped talking to them completely. Toby (the narrator), Jake, Eli, and their mom are the main characters. They are all pretty shaken up and upset about this happening. All of the brothers start to grow very close to each other. Then Jake, the older brother, starts to get into trouble with drugs. He begins to hang out with the town’s drug dealer and stealing. Toby then becomes his brother’s “keeper”, hence the name. He knows about Jake’s actions and doesn't tell anybody. Jake would come home high ad also quit the baseball team, his main hobby, and Toby doesn’t tell. He tries to help silently throughout the book though. One time by flushing his weed down the toilet. This goes on for a long while until one day Jake almost dies, gets arrested, and is sent to rehab. Before this Toby tries to call his father and leaves a message but t ends up being a different Tom Malone. Toby says Jake is in trouble and needs help, this is the only time Toby really tries to help in the right way but it wasn’t enough. The two biggest main characters being Jake and Toby run into a lot of problems. For example, Jake really begins to struggle with himself and his addiction due to loneliness because of his dad leaving. Toby has he problem of loving his brother and not wanting to get him in trouble but also wanting to help him overcome the battle with himself. All of the characters really struggle with losing their father but Jake and his mother especially. Both become very depressed. His mother focuses more on dating, starts smoking, stays in bed a lot, and ignores signs of Jake being an addict. Jake goes on “adventures” but not good ones. Mostly drug related and not like traveling adventures most would think of. He around with people who he shouldn’t be involved with. My favorite character personally was Jake just because there is a big focus on him and I feel he was the most interesting. Not that he was a great character to look up to, I really felt for him and the situation he was in because it was so touchy and emotional.
I could relate to a couple of the characters in the story. One being Toby; he really loved Jake and wanted to protect him but just didn’t know how to help. He was scared of snitching him out. I have been in a similar situation before. It is a really big struggle because you just don’t know what to do. I could also relate to their mother who was too oblivious to see warning signs before it was too late. I feel she chose to ignore them to not hurt herself even more. In the same way I related to Toby, I have been there. Sometimes it is easier to ignore severe things in someone else’s life to not cause confrontation with them and within yourself even though it’s not the best thing to do. I have done these things before with somebody close to me in my family. For example trying to ignore what’s going on and then when finding out too late, trying to cover for them to not hurt anybody.
I did like this book. It was a little slow in the beginning but once you get engaged with what is going on and what the book is really about, which is a deep topic, you become very interested. I like that the book had a deeper meaning than what you read in the beginning. My favorite part of the book is when Toby tries to get ahold of his dad for the first time after he leaves by searching and searching for his number. It was a very touching moment for Toby actually thought he was leaving a message to his father and says "If this is you, could you please call us back? Something bad happened and Jake's in trouble." When Tom Malone actually picks up, it’s not his dad and Toby says he “wishes there was a reason to stay on the phone with him.” This broke my heart, I feel like that was very painful for Toby because that was his first time actually trying to help in the right way and it failed. You could also tell he missed a father figure by when he said he wished there was a reason to be on the phone with him. I thoroughly enjoyed the book so I didn’t have a least favorite part, it was all interesting and emotional for me. In this book, Patricia Mccormick wrote in detail very well. I could visualize the things going on in my head most of the time. Her writing style kept me intrigued the whole time. One thing Mccormick could have worked on was making the book less predictable. Though it was interesting, I felt like I knew what was going to happen next. Maybe it was because I related to the narrator, but an unexpected twist would have been even better.
I would definitely recommend this book to other people. This is because it is a very eye opening story. Even if you can’t relate directly to the story I feel you can really take from it. The message of the book would not hurt anybody to know. I think the type of person that has shared some of the same, or similar experiences to different characters of the book are the people that would really enjoy it. Or even people that enjoy reading books about deep meanings would really love this book.

[Erin Sauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how this author writes. I really feel like im in tobys head while all this is happening and i like how the book ends

[Emily Carrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of those more serious types for 5th grade and up. Based on the reading level, I was expecting it to be 3rd grade level, but the topics of the book are so serious, in depth, and complicated that it would be difficult for a 3rd grader.

Toby Malone is the middle child of three rowdy boys who live with their single mother. Toby is a bright student with a love for his family and all things baseball. He's finally going through the beginning of the awkward pre-teen stages where girls finally start to become cute and have fewer cooties and sex-ed is a required class of his. The father is usually the one in the family to give the sex talk, but a few years back, his father left them in the middle of the night, scarring Toby for life. His mother went into a depressed-state for a while and it was up to Toby and his older brother, Jake, to take care of things around the house. When his mother came back to them, she was never the same. Toby tried his best to make everything perfect around the house and with the boys' lives, so she would never have to worry again.
Then, Jake starts getting into drugs, and Toby is willing to cover everything up for him just to make the family's life feel normal; if everything is normal, then mom won't go back into her depression. However, when Jake started hanging out with the druggies and then doing it himself, he quit baseball and never comes home earlier than 1:10am. Toby makes it on the baseball team, gets one of his favorite baseball cards from Mr. D (his only male role-model), and everything seems to be fine with the world for Toby. But what would happen if that world suddenly fell apart? Like if mom started dating someone else, if Jake started becoming more and more reckless, or if Toby can't handle the stress of school and home-life all at once.

My only issue with this book is that Eli is 8-years-old, and the author portrays Eli so immaturely like he's still in pre-school or something.

A well-written book about dealing with puberty, drugs, a missing dad, a clueless mom, and a just as clueless younger brother. Would keep this in my class library if I was a 4th or 5th grade teacher and above, but wouldn't read aloud to my students.

[stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

man, disappointing after Cut. not bad, but the innovative style of her debut book was put aside in exchange for a kind of boring narrative about three boys, drugs, and alcohol.

and if i had to read one more line about looking at the stargell baseball card, i was going to throw something. maybe the book. it was such a short book and it took me forever to read because frankly, i was bored. really, really bored.

which is so sad. because i really loved her first book, and i don't want to write her off. hopefully her next book comes out fast, and it focuses on girls instead of boys with absent fathers and depressive mothers.

[Patsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing story about a middle child trying to "help" his older brother while he watches him fall into a bad friendship, get into alcohol and drugs, and give up playing baseball.

Interesting to see how co-dependency forms in a person out of their need to "love" and "protect" the ones they care about while struggling at the same time with all of their own pent up anger towards the one they are trying to protect.

[Marten Wennik · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book is the second written by Patricia McCormick, it is the fifth I have read. For me, it did not quite equal the power of the other's written and, while certainly a pertinent and serious topic, did not really grab me like her other books. This novella is about a middle child in a crumbling American family. Toby's parents are divorced, his younger brother Eli is rejecting reality and not maturing, while his older brother, Jake, is falling apart because of a drug addiction and hanging with the wrong crowd. Toby is traumatized in a way by all of this and struggles to figure out his role, position, responsibility in all of this. Certainly, this is a relevant point of view in today's society.

However, McCormick seems to decide to take it to the next level with Toby struggling with early greying hair, potential girlfriend issues, making the baseball team, and some more challenges. While these are all realistic to a 9th-grade kid today, it seems too much for 175 pages and draws from the bigger issues, as Toby never really comes to terms with all these issues. McCormick makes much of the hair early on, but then dismisses it as a bit of humor in the end. She could have left that out and still been effective in telling the story of a pre-teen challenged with real-life issues.

Still, it is a good read and one that I would recommend to young readers entering their teenage years.

[Kati McLincha · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Brother's Keeper was written by Patricia McCormick in 2005. It would be categorized as realistic fiction, contemporary, teen, fiction, etc. It is an easy read, and I would suggest it for eighth grade and up. The writing style is very simple, but the subjects discussed are for older audiences, such as drug use, language, references about reproduction, etc. The story follows Toby; his father left the family, and his mother fell apart, along with his brother who turns to drugs. Toby finds himself as head of the household in most cases all while trying to hide Jake's drug addiction from his mother to keep her from getting angry. I really enjoyed reading the book. I have read Sold, also by Patricia McCormick, and enjoyed the writing style in Sold more. When I found My Brother's Keeper, I expected the same kind of advanced, sophisticated style, but I found it to be much more simplistic. I don't tend to gravitate towards lower level reading books, but the story line intrigued me when I read the first few pages, and I decided to finish it. I wish the book elaborated a little more on how Jake was feeling, going more in depth with his feelings. I also felt as if it was a little repetitive at times. In all, I really did enjoy this book, and I really want to read some of McCormick's other work. She is a fantastic author. I rate this book a four out of five stars.

[Stacey Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thirteen year old, Toby Malone, thinks if he works hard enough at it he can make everything okay. Hoping his father will return to the family, hiding overdue bills from his mother, lying about his brother....all meant to help. It's a lot to deal with and a never ending battle. Since his father left everything has changed and Toby wants it all to be back the way it was. He shoulders the burden of making it happen since no one else seems to even notice the difference. Toby's salvation is to hang out with Mr. D doing odd chores for him in his store. Mr. D surprises Toby with one of his greatest desires....which gives Toby something to hold on to and cherish in his falling apart life. When his mother starts dating "Mr. Heinie" and his brother starts hanging out with Andy Timmons Toby begins to really worry.
Family dynamics through a young boys' eyes.....feeling abandoned by his mother, father and older brother.....coping becomes his life.

[Carol Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jake, Toby, and Eli are trying to cope after their dad, who had a drinking "problem" left the family, moving to California and pretty much forgetting about them. Toby feels responsible for looking out for little Eli. He also feels like it is his job to protect Mom from finding out that Jake is using drugs and drinking, abandoning baseball after getting an MVP for the previous school year. Of course, those efforts eventually backfire, because Jake eventually goes too far.

[Ashton Gates · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the book on how many real life thing that can happen to a family in the problem they are in and Jake's bother is trying so hard to Jake's secret that it's hurting him and the family all together and he does not know.

[711Zara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though, it was kind of short and predictable, it's very good to read between really deep books because it has an interesting enough story line to keep you reading and has interesting characters as well.

[sophia noguera · Rating 3 out of 5]

My Brother's Keeper was a very fast and easy book to read. The entire time I was waiting for something big to happen...nothing surprising ended up happening. I personally feel like the story could have talked more about what was going on with his brother

[Melody · Rating 4 out of 5]

☆3.5☆ It was a surprisingly satisfying short read. I kept seeing it in the library, and I didn't really think it was gonna be all that good. I'm glad I read it because of all the spoken and unspoken things in it.

[Bailee · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning is what really got me hooked into reading this book. As the book continues though, it gets repetitive and the ending is confusing, to me at least. I understand but I don’t at the same time.

[711Cal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing really happens in this book, it is just kind of dull.

[711Clementine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it was short and had a predictable plot, I really enjoyed this book because it felt very realistic. I recommend it if you are looking for a quick read.

[Diana Morales · Rating 2 out of 5]

it was okay but i have read better ones towards the middle of the book i lost interest i started to get boring but hopefully you guys find it better to read if you read it

[Sophia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I remember liking it at the time. I found it when I was cleaning my room

[Lacey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Project “Clean Off Bookshelves.” Read originally in 2006; rated 4 stars. Re-read 2023; rated 2.5 stars. I can relate to Toby but it just didn’t hold up the same as when I was younger.

[Kami Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

sucked so mid.

[Dennis Begley · Rating 5 out of 5]

That Dad’s a dick

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sebastian Garcia 10B
Book review “My Brother’s Keeper”
Patricia McCormick

“That’s what ‘My Brother’s Keeper is all about. Helping more of our young people stay on track. Providing the support they need to think more broadly about their future. Building on what works – when it works, in those critical life-changing moments.”
- President Barack Obama, February 27, 2014
My brother’s Keeper is known for its message and way to represent a type of now so situation. The book concentrates in how an average age teen tries to reunite this dysfunctional family after his father left them and nobody seems to care. This lonely teen keeps searching a way to fix his family even though is unfixable, or is it?
Toby is the middle of the three Malone brothers. He is not that tall with brown hair and dark grey eyes .Toby is an interesting and smart boy with deep feelings hidden sadness and insecurity. He isn’t that academic and is normally excluded from sports or popularity, unlike his big brother Jake whose problems are about anger and drugs. Toby’s low self-esteem is because of his dad who left them a few years ago and affected all members of the family in a psychological way; this left their mom in a trauma which is the cause of this dysfunctional family. Toby feels lonelier during the book because he realizes nobody seems to care about repairing this family. He tries all the possible ways to reconstruct this family but he keeps failing and becomes more responsible as a reaction or outcome. Helping his little brother with homework or and using his savings for paying house debts isn’t a responsibility a teenager with that age should have, however this is the least of his problems in this despicable life he is living through.
My brother’s Keeper is book written in a teen’s point of view which describes how many things aren’t understandable for him and shows how he didn’t had high expectations on things except for repairing his broken family .The character of Toby is well described as a normal teen which level of maturity is higher than everyone else because of his family issues. Toby needs to look out for his whole family even his older brother which was apart from his family long time ago, that’s why he needs to be his brother’s keeper. This book shows the delicate theme of family and its importance in psychological terms. The importance of My brother’s keeper is the message and the symbols of hope it shows during the book. The story shows how each member of a family is important in order to make it work and how making a kid have a huge amount of responsibility can affect them which in some way can be identified as abuse. My brother’s keeper is a book that only treats one theme, in my opinion the book itself is repetitive and it didn’t have a concrete ending. Some emotions of the main character are unlikely to happen, however the message and symbols of the book are well showed and explained. The character’s development was clear during the book and the message of it is represented in the character’s actions, like how Toby’s maturity is increasing while all the other good qualities decrease. The book’s point is to deliver the message which can be described as an allegory, anyways the ending didn’t carry out the message as much as I expected.
I highly recommend this book to the teens that found themselves lost or have too many responsibilities they consider is abuse. Also to the people that actually like to learn something from books and would like to learn about families and responsibilities, teens that would like to learn how many families don’t need a hero, but many. Meaning that not only one person can make it work.

[Kay Mcgriff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toby has a passion and a big problem. His passion is baseball. He works part time for Mr. D. so he can earn money to buy baseball cards, especially players for his beloved Pittsburgh Pirates. He even makes his high school baseball team as a backup catcher. Not too bad for a freshman brainiac who is a year younger than his classmates. The cute girl on the softball team even smiles at him. Now if he could just get through Nurse Wesley's classes on human sexuality without dying of embarrassment, school would definitely be looking up.

At home, though, things are falling apart faster than he can pick them up and put them back together again. Ever since his dad moved to California and he had to leave his old home and neighborhood, Toby has tried to hold his family together. He's worried his mom might slip back into the funk that left her in bed for weeks. Throwing out the American Express bills and ordering three magazines for a chance to win one million dollars, though, might not have been the best plan. He wants to be the wise older brother for Eli, but how do you answer your younger brother's question about the Easter Bunny? Toby's biggest problem is his oldest brother, Jake. Jake slips out at night and comes back later and later. He's dropped off the baseball team to hang out with a known drug dealer. No matter how much Toby cleans up the messes and sprays orange citrus scent, it is not enough to cover over the odor of pot.

Patricia McCormick hits a homerun with My Brother's Keeper (Hyperion Paperbacks 2005). Baseball and hormones collide in Toby's life as he struggles to make sense of his family. I found myself laughing out loud at parts. Toby can be quite funny, intentionally or not. At other times my heart ached for him. He felt he had to solve problems by himself that are simply too big for one thirteen-year-old to take on alone. Slowly, Toby realizes that he is not alone and that he can reach out to ask for help.

Published on my blog at http://kaymcgriff.edublogs.org/2012/0...

[Jkisiolek]

I have just finished reading the book My Brother’s Keeper by Patricia McCormick. I truly disliked this book more than any other I have read in recent memory. While the plot has the potential to be thrilling or emotionally intense, this book did not deliver on either fronts. For the most part, the book was about as cliché as it gets and featured a protagonist that I both hated and could not relate with in the least.
The story follows the struggles of fourteen year old, Toby Malone. Toby is the middle child of three brothers whose alcoholic father has recently abandoned them. Toby’s mother is struggling to support the family and is being wooed by a fast food mogul. But the biggest problem in Toby’s life is his older brother Jake, who is suffering from a “heavy addiction” to drugs. Toby tries very hard to keep this a secret from his mother but fails in the end when Jake makes the biggest mistake of his life.
Toby is not a protagonist that I would have chosen for this story. He seems like he would be more at home in a Goonies-type adventure story. He is not someone who can handle serious situations and is irrational in his thinking. Toby often worsens situations with short term solutions like throwing away his mother’s credit card bills before she can see them and become more stressed than she already is. Toby is not his “brother’s keeper” but rather the person that allowed him to deteriorate to the point where he needs a keeper. The book’s main downfall however, is that the nightmare situation that Jake is living in is not that bad at all. Jake smokes pot with his friends and quits the baseball team. In no way is this the life of a truly troubled youth. In my opinion, the book should be retitled something to the tune of “How I Annoyed My Brother, Ruined My Mother’s Love Life, and Sent Our Family into Poverty.”

[Jennifer Wardrip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed by Long Nguyen for TeensReadToo.com

A brother's love is a brother's love: one of the many truths to life and family. In MY BROTHER'S KEEPER, Patricia McCormick tells a sharp tale of the often too-complex relationships between brothers, and the unspoken feelings and subtleties of such a fragile thing.

Toby idolizes his big brother Jake. Jake's the typical big brother figure; cool, funny, charming, and the school baseball team stud. But things don't always turn out to be as great as they appear on the surface. Internally, there are struggles. Toby's father has left their family to search his fortune elsewhere and has seemed to cease all contact with them. His mother is distant and has taken a stance of resignation. And to complicate the situation even more so, inevitably past Toby's endurance, Jake has fallen into a rut he cannot get out of. The world of drugs.

Now Jake doesn't seem to be around as much anymore. He leaves the house, returning in the middle of the night faded and disillusioned, leaving the responsibility up to Toby to clean things up, make everything seem fine, and to smooth away the creases.

But when Jake finally goes too far, will it be up to Toby to decided how to handle things? Will he rat his brother out, breaking the cardinal rule of the big-brother/little-brother relationship, trespassing on regions of brotherhood Toby has never touched upon?

McCormick creates a completely believable and down-to-earth narrative of internal struggles in the mind of a growing boy's problems in not only the broader family unit, but also the profound nuances of the complicated structure of kinship between siblings. Not only that, but she manages to keep it lighthearted at the right moments, as well as comedic at others.

Cheers to P.M.

[Austin Van Veldhuizen]

Imagine a family is falling apart slowly. This is what is happening to Toby , Jake, Eli and their mom after their dad left. Now they have to come together to fix their problems. In the story My Brother’s Keeper the characters are not that similar and family is a major topic because they all need each other.
In the story the characters are very different which adds conflict to the story. Characters can be socially different. This is proven when Toby is nervous to talk about personal stuff and over exaggerates. This is shown when Toby says “Until I finally realize that I've been talking for about 185 hours.” Characters can also have different personalities. Evidence of this is that Jake is a rebel and does not like baseball anymore. This is proven when the author says “ Then he looks back at Coach Gillis. “I'm done with baseball.”
The theme of the story is about family which adds relatable situations because mostly everybody has a family. Part of the theme is caring for family. Evidence of this is when Toby says “how she's looked ever since our dad left, which sometime makes me think that maybe she might really be sick.” Another part of the theme is worrying about family. Another piece of evidence is when Toby says “ things people do when they're high. What I don't know is what you're supposed to do when it's your brother”.
This book was full of family situations which is why it is relatable and interesting. In the end of this book the family learns how to get through their problems and they have learned their lessons.

[Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thirteen-year-old Toby Malone watches in despair as his older brother, once a star athlete, travels down a path of ruin, becoming increasingly involved with drugs. Not wanting to upset his recently divorced mother, who is already overwhelmed with problems, Toby remains silent about Jake's addiction, and in effect becomes his brother's "keeper," making excuses for Jake when he disappears into the night and comes home stoned. When Jake's friends make a mess in the house, Toby cleans it up, and when Jake quits the baseball team, Toby doesn't tell. The one time Toby attempts to take control of Jake's problem by flushing a bag of marijuana down the toilet, Jake retaliates by stealing and selling Toby's most prized possession. Tension mounts as Jake's activities get wilder and more dangerous and Toby starts to slowly give up. Until everyone takes things a little too far.

This book connects to everyone who's ever kept a secret they probably shouldn't have. Toby's feelings are fairly common so he's relate able as well. Anyone who's in their own world would connect to the main characters as well. Basically, everyone will connect to some thing in it.

I really liked this book. I gave it four out of five stars. It gave good incite and refreshing creativity but at the same time it was kind of sad. I would recommend this book to all teenagers.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toby lives with his mother and his two brothers, one is older and his name is Jake and the baby brother is Eli. Their father left them and moved to California and they have not heard from him since. The mother does her very best to support her family but with her job and stress she looses track of her children who are left on their own a lot of the time. Jake gets into drugs and is not the person he use to be at all. Jake, Toby and their father use to love baseball especially the Pirates. Toby now collects baseball cards and is trying out for the high school baseball team as a freshman. But Jake who was a star player will not play because he is mixed up with drugs and drinking. We follow Toby as he takes on more responsibility and has to make decisions about how he will react.
I really enjoyed this book because it is a great representation of what drugs can do to a family and leaving your kids on their own can lead to some bad choices that parents might not find out about until their child is in too deep to get out very easily and the consequences of their actions become very serious. The fact that Toby is our narrator is amazing because as a reader you can see how drugs and these addictive substances really work and how they can affect others who are not even partaking of the substances but are only affected by it and many of the choices that they have to make.