Thoughts on a Book I Did Not Finish at Age Thirteen
A Review (?) of Mal Peet's Keeper (2003)
Something makes me think it was January 2009, though I can’t say for certain. It was the eighth grade, I was 13, I can guarantee those things. My Language Arts (i.e. English) teacher was big into multimedia assignments. For our unit on 20th century fiction, I made a movie trailer for Milkweed set to Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm.” For our unit on Current Young Adult Issues, I made a photo slideshow for 13 Reasons Why set to Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right.” Both of these were probably as tasteful as they sound.
For our historical fiction unit, we were to write a monologue from the prospective of the protagonist of a novel of our choice, then narrate and animate it with a flash website named Voki which I have just learned still exists. On what must have been the first day of that unit, my class was shepherded into the library at the center of the school. Our librarian, who had not yet married nor divorced my pediatrician, directed us to a shelf fully stocked with junior high-level historical fiction novels.
“Anything on this shelf will work,” she stated.
I scanned the shelves and found nothing that particularly interested me at first glance, but there were something like 20 kids in that class each looking at a bookshelf maybe twenty feet wide and four feet tall, so I couldn’t investigate at the depth I would’ve wanted to have taken. I looked upwards and met the stoic gaze of this thin boy, who stared from a dust jacket cover wrapped around a hardcover book on a little plastic stand atop the bookcase. It was the gaze that really got to me: The determination in that stare conceals, but doesn’t fully conceal, whatever narratively-satisfying, life-affirming pain the boy carries. The soccer ball in his arms, of course, lent context to the title, “Keeper,” which I suppose I wouldn’t have necessarily assumed had to do with soccer had I only seen its spine from the shelf. I picked the book up and went to the counter, where the librarian’s assistant made no commentary on whether or not it was appropriate for the project or not.
I got back to the classroom and began reading. The story is framed as an interview between a Brazilian sportswriter and the goalkeeper of the Brazilian national team one week after Brazil wins the World Cup. I distinctly remember three things: That the journalist calls the World Cup trophy kind of ugly, that the goalkeeper was nicknamed “El Gato,” and that I really enjoyed it. To the journalist, the keeper describes his upbringing in a small village in the middle of the Amazon rainforest as a gangly, unathletic child, who finds an anomalous soccer field cleared out of the middle of the forest, where he is coached up by a ghostly goalkeeper.
The journalist is incredulous, the keeper is sincere and thorough, and the author, Mal Peet, does excellent work playing with that tension throughout the book’s early-going. He does excellent work conveying the second-to-second basics of a goalkeeper’s experience between the posts as well, making soccer-specific detail and jargon sensible to an uninitiated (well, not fully uninitiated, I’d been to 2 seasons of Kansas City Wizards matches with my dad at that point) 13 year-old. After a few afternoons reading it after school, I was loving it!
I was loving it too much, I suspected. This was supposed to be something for school, which meant it was homework, which meant it was not intended to be loved like this. Clearly, I had made a mistake. I thought back to when I picked it up: That gaze, that boy, that stand on the bookshelf. Well, maybe more precisely on top of the bookshelf, or upon the bookshelf, or atop the bookshelf... But the sentence “This book was on the bookshelf” was not untrue, if I needed to explain myself. This may have been my first interaction with semantics, a rival that I’ve come to romance and adore in a fashion similar to the one that El Gato takes to goalkeeping throughout the story.
Along with that, I began to question whether it counted as historical fiction or not. The interview that frames the narrative is set in then-contemporary Sao Paolo: The book was published in 2008 and follows a World Cup, plus El Gato states that his team defeated Germany (not West Germany) in the WC final, which means it’d be between 1994 and 2002. The journalist uses a digital voice recorder, so it would probably have been set at least past the turn of the millennium. Of course, in reality, Brazil defeated Germany in the 2002 World Cup final, but without a goalkeeper named “El Gato”. Peet never directly states when this story takes place, but I can definitely state that the framing narrative was contemporary. I held out some hope, as I read, that the ghost goalkeeper would take El Gato back in time to the mid-20th century at some point for advanced lessons, but this didn’t happen, or at least it didn’t happen before anxiety got the best of me.
I went back into the library the next morning on a reconnaissance mission. If that top shelf above the historical fiction shelf displayed historical fiction books, I was probably in the clear. My heart sank as I saw the covers of late-2000s popular Emerging Adult fiction: The Hunger Games, Artemis Fowl, Divergent, the Warrior Cats, the Maximum Ride sequel that swerves into a well-intentioned but ham-fisted diatribe on global warming, et cetera. My instincts were correct: the stands atop the shelf were not for historical fiction books, but for any sort of book that might serve as leisurely reading for teenagers like me. Keeper was too good to be homework. My Voki monologue would not feature a young El Gato.
I then did two things, only one of which I’m particularly interested in interrogating in this blog post. The first, less-interesting thing, was that I scanned the shelf for the most obvious historical fiction book I could find, choosing a “The Moonshiner’s Son” by Carolyn Reeder. From this book, I learned that brandy comes from fruit and whiskey comes from corn. It has a 3.53 on Goodreads at the moment and will only be mentioned once more in this essay, and then only in passing.
The second thing, the more personally interesting one in retrospect, was that I returned Keeper. I don’t think that I could only have a single book checked out at a time, or at least I cannot imagine that the well-stocked library of a well-off suburban junior high school like mine had a one-book limit. It’s not as if I was so allergic to reading that I couldn’t fathom reading for leisure, either -- I enjoyed some of the Terry Pratchett books my dad had lent me prior to summer camp the year prior and I had to work through the first three of those Maximum Ride books to get the fact that the fourth one was a well-intentioned but ham-fisted swerve into global warming stuck so deep in my craw that I can draw it back up for a blog post seventeen years later. I don’t understand why I couldn’t recontextualize this book, which I enjoyed so much that I couldn’t fathom it as homework, into a book that I could just enjoy on its own merits.
I’m also interested in what I didn’t do, namely, ask or tell or just talk to anyone about this conundrum in the moment. I didn’t ask my classmates about it, didn’t ask the librarian about it, and I was too shy to ask my teacher about it. I think I avoided her out of fear of revealing myself as semantically-challenged, even though I think a more self-assured Joe at 13 would have been able to make a case for this book as a work of historical fiction. The bulk of the narrative takes place during the El Gato’s teenage years, which, given that he’s explicitly stated to be 30 years old in the text, would place the narrative sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the middle-third of the book takes place in a Brazilian logging camp, something I would have learned had I not chickened out before the end of the first-third. Currently as a grown man, I know nothing about the lives of teenage loggers in Brazil in the 1980s, and I knew even less about it at thirteen. There is a significant degree of historical perspective that I would have gained from finishing this book. Yet, I did not. I put the book back in the little slot that dropped it into the pile of other returned books and read about moonshine.
It was early December of 2025, the weekend of the winter book sale at the Lawrence Public Library. I was decidedly 30. With my father, I stepped down to the library basement, cutting angles through the crowds within the already-cramped aisles between the stacks. I go to the soccer shelf, which is as sparsely populated as ever, being fully sourced from donations. I pull the spine of a book entitled “Keeper” and meet the thin boy’s gaze again, as striking as it was seventeen years ago. I start to wonder: Is this the one from eighth grade? The one I stopped reading because I liked it too much?
There was nervous tension in the basement air and someone was trying to nudge behind me -- I had little time to peruse, but I flipped to an early page to see the POV character call the World Cup kind of an ugly trophy. It was one dollar per hardcover, and I was curious how it progressed. I put the book in my little tote bag amid all the other one-dollar finds, tracked down my father, paid for our books because he’d forgotten his wallet in the car, and went on with my life.
It is Mid-December of 2025 and my busiest work semester by a fair amount has concluded. I immediately get sick for three days and my brain is fried to begin with. Why not nurse myself back to life with some emerging adult literature? Why not tie up the loose end I’d left in the library so long ago?
Keeper is a very good piece of young adult fiction. It deals with the typical themes of a sports bildungsroman: El Gato starts out shy, bullied, and lost, then finds himself through hard work and repetition. There’s an underlying environmentalist theme which Peet injects with far more grace than James Patterson took to the aforementioned fourth Maximum Ride sequel. Young El Gato must come up with a cover story for his parents, as “I’m training to become a soccer goalkeeper with a ghost in the forest” wouldn’t suffice, so he acts as a burgeoning dendrologist, taking samples from trees and capturing insects he comes across en route to the clearing. This pretended interest develops into an actual interest over time. El Gato’s father, in contrast, is a logger, who prides himself on cutting the forest down for profit. Peet does excellent sensory work in contrasting the dank weight of the forest against the barren dryness left in the wake of the loggers’ work, too.
I think if I’d read longer at thirteen, I would’ve been very interested in the gruesome detail that Peet uses to convey the brutality of a life in the logging industry. Upon El Gato’s arrival at the logging camp, he describes men who come to work drunk, teenage boys tasked with transporting running chainsaws through muddy terrain, often with predictable results. One scene has a boy of El Gato’s age cut in half at the waist (the word for which, I’ve just learned, is truncation) by a loose guide wire. El Gato’s father is crushed by a tree while he vomits out a hangover following his son’s triumph with his Italian club team. Tell me those aren’t satisfyingly challenging ideas for a thirteen year-old boy to grapple with!
I’m struck by the parallels that emerged here. El Gato, in the text, is a thirty year-old man coming off of his greatest triumph describing a decision he made as an early teenager that set the course of the rest of his life. I, right now, am a thirty year-old man coming off of no tremendous triumph describing a decision he made as an early teenager that had far less of an impact on the course of the rest of his life. I tend to romanticize who I wasn’t in youth, so of course I figure that, had I just kept reading that book instead of returning it, I would’ve turned into a more active reader at 13 and spent more of my teenage years in love with literature, rather of coming around to literature during my Freshman year of college as I actually did. Life is, of course, not that simple.
However, there was something nice about the serendipity of this all. I clearly hadn’t forgotten about Keeper, but I hadn’t really thought about it in years, save for the times in which I looked at the World Cup trophy itself and briefly thought about that one book I started in the eighth grade where the POV character called it kind of ugly. It found its way back into my life through a misfiling — It should not have been in the nonfiction/sports/soccer section, it should have been in the Young Adult literature section, where I would not have looked. If the place weren’t more crowded and had I more time to think about it, I might have decided to put it back on the shelf. If I weren’t so burnt out at the year’s end, I might not have felt like turning to a young adult novel like this one. Had I not elected to return the book unfinished at 13, I wouldn’t have picked it up at all.
Yet, here we are. 2000+ words into a standalone blog post, one that I’ve had fun writing in contrast to the rancor that writing presented me over much of 2025. I know more about the Brazilian logging industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s than I did last month. I’ve finished a book that thirteen year-old Joe started, connecting the two of us across time.
Mal Peet died in 2015 at the age of 67. Keeper was his first novel, and he would have written it in his mid-fifties before its publication in 2003. His Wikipedia page offers this quote about his profession:
"I come up here in the morning to a pleasant room in the roof of my house and imagine I'm a black South American football superstar, then I have to imagine I'm a female pop celebrity who's pregnant. It's a completely mad way to spend your time. If I did it in public I would be sectioned. Writing is a form of licensed madness."