Messner, Kate. Trouble with Heroes, The. Bloomsbury, 04/2025. 356pp. Fiction. Trade $17.99. 978-1-5476-1639-8. GRADES 5–8. HIGH ADDITIONAL.
Twelve-year-old Finn’s dad was a hero in the country’s eyes: a 9/11 first responder before an untimely death during the pandemic. To Finn he was absent and inscrutable, and two years later, Finn’s anger has reached a breaking point. For kicking over the gravestone of a prominent Adirondack hiker and almost failing both PE and Language Arts, his mom and the gravestone-bearer’s daughter have devised a plan: he must hike all 46 Adirondack High Peaks with volunteer “46ers” while completing a 20-poem creative writing project coincidentally on the subject of heroes. Via Finn’s first-person verse in various poetic forms, as well as text messages, documents, and even cookie recipes, the reader is taken on his mental and physical journey and through memories and revelations about his dad, the ways grieving was stifled by pandemic protocols, and deep questions surrounding his dad’s feelings for Finn at the time of his death. Finn’s engaging voice is most successful when his wry tween humor shines through, such as when offering “Choose Your Own Disaster” scenarios in the thick of tricky hikes and expressing angsty frustrations. It’s less believable, perhaps, in the beautifully crafted epiphanies, as when contemplating grief: “Lost looks safer tucked / between long and friend, / each with an arm around its shoulder. / On its own / it just floats there / Lost.” This work is a standout in its unique setting and structure, and tackling of a child’s grief in the context of adult sacrifice. The facts of 9/11 will be unfamiliar to many readers and are not explained, and references to the social distancing of the pandemic may be hard for younger readers to understand. The neatly tied happy ending is a satisfying, if utopian resolution, and the mad-but-not-dangerous and grumbling-but-acquiescent protagonist makes for a gentle and palatable introduction to grief and anger for young readers. Characters present as white. Sure to be popular with English teachers for years to come, give this to children who appreciate poetry, hiking, and epistolary novels.
Riva Pollard—Sausalito Public Library