Jumping the Scratch is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Sarah Weeks

Sarah Weeks

Sarah Weeks is a children's book author, perhaps best known for writing So B. It which in 2007 won the Rebecca Caudill Young Reader's Book Award and William Allen White Children's Book Award.-Life:...

 written for young adults

Young adult literature

Young-adult fiction or young adult literature , also juvenile fiction, is fiction written for, published for, or marketed to adolescents and young adults, roughly ages 14 to 21. The Young Adult Library Services of the American Library Association defines a young adult as "someone between the...

. It was first published in 2006.

Plot summary

Eleven-year-old Jamie Reardon’s cat dies, his father leaves home; and his aunt Sapphy has an accident at work that causes her memory to skip. Jamie is a boy who is teased at school and, on the other hand, has a memory he'd give anything to be able to forget. He is performing badly at school and has Miss Miller,an unsympathetic teacher.

A visiting author, or as Jamie hears the name - 'Arthur', recognises that the boy is troubled, but the two do not have a chance to really communicate. Jamie has to sort out his problems himself. He tries to find the magic trigger that will help Sapphy's memory jump the scratch, like the needle on a record, but in the end it's Audrey Krouch, a neighborhood girl who hypnotises him. Under hypnosis, when he is hoping to learn how to forget, Jamie recalls his recent sexual abuse

Child sexual abuse

Child sexual abuse is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent uses a child for sexual stimulation. Forms of child sexual abuse include asking or pressuring a child to engage in sexual activities , indecent exposure with intent to gratify their own sexual desires or to...

 by Old Gray, a paedophile

Pedophilia

As a medical diagnosis, pedophilia is defined as a psychiatric disorder in adults or late adolescents typically characterized by a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children...

 caretaker at the trailer park where he lives in Traverse City, Michigan

Traverse City, Michigan

Traverse City is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is the county seat of Grand Traverse County, although a small portion extends into Leelanau County. It is the largest city in the 21-county Northern Michigan region. The population was 14,674 at the 2010 census, with 143,372 in the Traverse...

. Jamie's emotional reaction to the incident he was trying to suppress returns Sapphy’s memory, and the boy is finally able to tell her everything.

The actual abuse is not described in the book. Sarah Weeks has said that, "I felt like I wanted to protect Jamie’s privacy... Jamie didn’t want anybody to know what had happened to him in Old Gray’s office on Christmas Eve, so it didn’t feel right for me to tell all the details either."