Listen to the First Chapter:
From the Book Jacket:
Three screws in her hip.
Two months until spring training.
One answer to all her problems.
Micky Catalan's life has been littered with struggles - from the scars that tell of past injuries to her parents' divorce to the daily complexity of finding the right words to fit in socially. Mickey is no stranger to pain, emotional or physical.
When a car crash sidelines her months before softball season, Mickey has to find a way to hold on to her spot as the catcher for a team expected to make a historic tournament run. Behind the plate is the only place she's ever felt comfortable, and the painkillers she's been prescribed can help her get back there.
The pills do more than take away the pain; they aker her feel good. With a new circle of friends - fellow injured athletes, others with just time to kill - Mickey finds peaceful acceptance and people with whom words come easily, even if it is just the pills loosening her tongue. But as the pressure to be Mickey Catalan heightens, her need increases, and it becomes less about pain and more about want, something that could send her spiraling out of control.
Reviews:
HEROINE shines a light on the young people affected by America's opioid crisis. Mickey Catalan is a good, well-liked teen. She's honest and hardworking and a star of her championship softball team. In fact, softball is her life, her passion. When Mickey and her best friend get into a serious car accident, Mickey is anxious to recover in time to play her senior season and secure a spot on a college team. She's prescribed OxyContin for her pain and discovers she loves the warm, painless cocoon the drug provides. Convincing herself that she should keep taking it until she's back in shape and playing well, she betrays the trust of her family and friends to get the drug illegally. Her descent into addiction and her need to hide her drug use upends her relationships with those who love her. With her life and future on the line, Mickey needs to face some hard truths about her behavior and her health, but the drugs make it far too easy to ignore these important problems and let her life slip away.
-- Common Sense Media
A compassionate, compelling, and terrifying story about a high school softball player’s addiction to opioids. A promising life can be upended in a minute. One moment star catcher Mickey Catalan, who is assumed white, is living an ordinary life, talking about boys and anticipating a winning season with her best friend, pitcher Carolina Galarza. The next moment her car is upside down in a field, and their promising softball careers are in danger. Mickey’s divorced parents and Carolina’s tight knit Puerto Rican family are rooting for them to recover before the start of the season. After enduring surgeries, they are each given opioid painkillers, yet only Mickey spirals into addiction. From the novel’s opening line, the reader awaits the tragic outcome. What matters are the details—the lying, the stealing, the fear about college scholarships, the pain confronted in the weight room, and the desperate desire to win—because they force the reader to empathize with Mickey’s escalating need. Realistic depictions of heroin abuse abound, and the author includes a trigger warning. The writing is visceral, and following Mickey as she rationalizes about her addiction is educative and frightening. Even more frightening are the descriptive passages that reveal how pleasant the drugs make her feel. By the end, readers understand how heroin can infiltrate even the most promising lives.
A cautionary tale that exposes the danger of prescription medications by humanizing one victim of America’s current epidemic. -- Kirkus Reviews
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