I’m familiar with Sachar’s work — I did read and love Holes, after all, so I picked up this book so see what else he’d been up to. It turns out that he wrote a book in which Bridge is heavily involved, and you know, it wasn’t that bad.
17-year-old Alton Richards is a pushover when it comes to people. He let his best friend steal his girlfriend, tells his great-uncle Lester that he is his favourite uncle just so his parents can get at some inheritance, and is generally mopey and passive. One day, great-uncle Lester’s maid calls him and asks him to be his cardturner — it turns out Lester can’t see, and needs someone to tell him what his hand is, and which card to play.
And so Alton learns how to play bridge. Along the way, he meets Toni Castaneda, the daughter of an old acquaintance, figures out why his family thinks she is insane, and the whole mystery behind his uncle Lester’s moodiness. Sachar explains the rules of Bridge and draws readers into the game while telling the story — the reader gets to know how to play bridge by looking for sections marked with whales. This is an allusion to Moby Dick, and Sachar’s use of this icon is to tell us that he won’t get too wrapped up in the book’s technicalities (like Melville did in his) so that the story can progress.
Sachar’s characters are likeable, and the unadorned, literal way in which he delivers the story is quite charming. We all end up rooting for Lester, and even for Toni and Alton to get together — like, just kiss already. His honest portrayal of conniving and greedy parents who didn’t know how to manage their money was spot on, and his struggle of standing up to his best friend was all too relatable.
However, the technicalities of the game slowed the pacing, and it didn’t seem like a story that happened to have bridge in it. The big reveal of all of Uncle Lester’s secrets was a letdown, too — it was Sachar didn’t trust the readers to make intelligent inferences, unlike Holes, and the foreshadowing wasn’t cleverly done.
Still, bridge is a complicated game and it would have been incredibly difficult to explain the game within the story seamlessly — props to Sachar for giving us compelling characters like Lester and Alton to keep us hooked.
7/10