The Body of Christopher Creed

The Body of Christopher Creed

By Carol Plum-Ucci

Harcourt Children's, 2000. 259 pages. Mystery.

ISBN: 9780152063863

Reading/Interest Level: Ages 13+

Curriculum ties: Culture and diversity, friendship, values

Booktalk Ideas: Walk a mile: Have a mock case file and act like an investigator going through the file, referring to some of the suspects and why they’re suspicious.

Challenge Issues: N/A

Challenge Response: First Defense File

Reader’s Annotation:

When Christopher Creed goes missing, no one is quite sure what has happened to him. One classmate takes up the case and finds that Creed’s life was something he never imagined.

Plot Summary:

As Torey starts his senior year at a new school far from his hometown, he begins to reflect on the events of the past year and what drove him away from home.

The year before, a boy called Christopher Creed disappeared without a trace apart from an email to the school’s principle. Whether he simply ran away or committed suicide no one knows, but Tory decided to investigate. Through the course of his searching he discovers that Creed’s mother was extremely controlling and the relationship and girlfriend he wrote about in his journal wasn’t nearly as real as he wrote. Torey sees that there were a lot of reasons for Creed to want to disappear, but it seems everyone in town is trying to shift blame to someone else. Even the students at their school bullied Creed in various ways.

When Torey gets accused of murdering Creed he goes out in search of him to prove his innocence, but what he finds will push Torey over the edge.

Critical Evaluation:

This wasn’t my favorite book ever, but I loved the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Creed and Torey’s investigation. I think the point of the novel was to show the mental devastation that occurs when repeated and relentless bullying happens, which is clearly the reason Creed wanted to disappear, but I think I didn’t like the story because there wasn’t a single character that was innocent of bullying. The reason for that I’m sure was to show the reader how bleak Creed’s world was, and it worked.

The ending was very inconclusive and left the reader hanging. While I personally don’t like an inconclusive ending, for this story it worked well because it put the reader in the same place as Torey. We were hoping he would find Christopher Creed and read the responses to his search with hope, but we couldn’t tell if any of the responses were actually Creed. The reader doesn’t know any more than Torey which leaves us hanging and anticipating just as much as Torey. It was a great story mechanic and works well, even if I didn’t particularly like it.

About the Author:

Plum-Ucci spent her childhood growing up on the barrier island of Brigantine, New Jersey, where her father was a funeral director. She lived overtop of the funeral home.

‘My bedroom was such that if the floor were made of glass, I would have been gazing down into the face of a casket dweller,’ she frequently tells audiences. ‘When people ask me how I became a writer, I say it was in the middle of nights while growing up there.’

Plum-Ucci loves to tell her childhood funeral home antics, which have captivated teenage audiences across America.

She attended the Brigantine Public Schools, Atlantic City Friends School, and Holy Spirit High School, graduating in 1975. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Communication from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in 1979. She attended Rutgers University and received her Master of Arts degree 2004.

Plum-Ucci worked as Staff Writer and Director of Publications for the Miss America Organization in Atlantic City from 1984 through 1999. She is the third generation of women in her family to contribute to Atlantic City’s well-known fanfare. Her mother, Ellen Plum, was the first woman President, and her paternal grandmother, Ads Plum, was a member of the Hostess Committee.

She retired from corporate employ in June of 1999, ‘about two days after my advance arrived for The Body of Christopher Creed,’ she says. ‘I loved being part of something historical like Miss America, and I have many great memories of working there. But I’d spent many years trying to become a published novelist, and I wanted to started enjoying that lifestyle as quickly as possible.”

Her husband Rick owns the Ucci Piano Service. Together, they love gardening, going to the Margate Beach in the summers, watching Academy Award winning movies, and raising their daughter, Abbey.

-from author’s website-

Justification of Selection:

This book is a good way to help teens understand empathy as they learn about the various struggles Creed faced as he tried to fit in. It is also a good way to show the many facets of bullying.