Catch by Sara Brill

Title: Catch

Author: Sarah Brill

Genre: Contemporary

Publisher: Allen and Unwin

Published: 30^th September 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 304

Price: $24.99

Synopsis: A unique and irresistible YA coming-of-age story about sixteen-year-old Beth, who discovers she has a life-saving gift. A superb novel about finding out what it takes to be an unlikely hero.

Sometimes people fall. It happens. Sometimes people are pushed. Sometimes people jump. And sometimes there’s someone there to catch them.

The summer Beth turns sixteen, she grows. She grows so fast her bones hurt and she feels like throwing up. Everyone – including Etienne, the boy who lives over the road – looks at her differently. Then she starts catching people. People who are falling out of trees or from tall buildings.

Soon Beth discovers that helping strangers sometimes hurts. Sometimes it also hurts or annoys the people she loves. It isn’t great for her school grades, either. Is there a way to balance family and friendship and basketball and romance and … catching?

An extraordinary story about finding out who you are, and discovering who you want to be.

~*~

Young adult books are often all about coming-of-age, and finding out who you are as a teen. Catch is another novel that fits this space. Beth has grown during the summer between year ten and year eleven. So fast that her bones hurt and she feels like throwing up. Now she’s sixteen, and everyone is looking at her differently, including Etienne, the boy across the road.

Things have changed since Beth’s older sister, Meg, announced she’s pregnant to boyfriend Rik. Not only are they under pressure from Rik’s parents to get married and do things their way, but Beth has also discovered she can catch people as they fall from trees, buildings or other high places. She’s an unlikely and perhaps an unwilling hero, trying to balance school, basketball, caching and everything going on with her family.

But what happens when catching starts to interfere with her sleep, her studying, and being on the basketball team? Everything is falling apart, and everyone is getting angry with Beth. But who can she trust? The first person she trusts is Lin, her best friend who is determined to find patterns in how the catching happens. The reasons the people Beth goes to seem to call to her, and how it is affecting Beth.

Beth’s life is complicated in this novel. The only thing that should be tricky for her in year eleven is balancing studying, friends, work and basketball. And yet…the added layer of her ability to catch people makes the novel quite different. There’s no magical or supernatural explanation, or at least not one that is explicitly given. For Beth, it’s just a thing that happens and she can’t explain it when people start asking where she goes in the middle of lessons or basketball practice, or in the middle of the night.

Catch feels like a different coming-of-age story in some ways. We get insights into a family dynamic that changes through teen pregnancy and Beth’s gift, as well as cultural clashes, desires to do the right thing and keep the peace whilst also maintaining a sense of independence. It’s also about trust and learning that the hard things need to be spoken. That Beth needs to find a way to tell people what she is going through so they can help her. And at its heart, it is about mental health. Because Beth seems to take on so much from the people she catches that it starts to affect her. I felt like it dealt with all of this delicately and gently, and didn’t give us answers to the catching on purpose. I liked this, as it added to the air of mystery about the novel, and the implication that not everything in life has a reason or explanation. It also hinted at the idea that growing up is full of surprises and things that we just need to find ways to cope with.

It was meant to be a mystery or have no real explanation that people might expect. It just happens. Like life. Life and all its complexities are on full, raw display in this novel. Teen pregnancy. Family conflicts. Friendship conflicts. And the implications all of these can have on us as people and our relationships with the people we spend a lot of time with. It largely deals with Beth, as everything is seen through her perspective and we learn about the world through what she sees. It brings the reader into her world, and allows us to get some understanding of what she does and how she feels.

Whilst set in a real world, in an unnamed and largely unidentifiable city in Australia, there is a hint of wonder and speculation about it, particularly around the catching. It creates a curiosity around everything that is going on, and how people navigate changes in their lives that they have no control over. This new young adult novel examines all of this insightfully, and will hopefully appeal to teens and help them realise that they can cope with the unpredictability of life.