Will tide over youngsters longing for the start of the sport’s spring season.
Fourteen-year-old Mike McGinn is a promising pitcher for his baseball team, the Rays, but his father sees baseball as a frivolous hobby.
Mike’s dad thinks he should be working this summer, so the teen takes a job caddying at the local country club while continuing to hone his pitching skills. But sometimes hard work and solid pitching aren’t enough, as Mike finds when his team makes it to the final game of the end-of-season tournament. The game goes into extra innings, and though Mike’s pitching is top-notch, the results aren’t quite what the Rays had expected. Still, Mike learns important lessons along the way. Bowen balances action both on and off the field as Mike and his father slowly come to understand each other a little better. Baseball fans will especially appreciate the baseball terminology and slang and the descriptions of the Rays’ various games and Mike’s pitching. They’ll also enjoy learning that this story is based in part on a historical baseball game—in 1959, Pittsburg Pirates pitcher Harvey Haddix threw 12 perfect innings against the Atlanta Braves, only to lose in the 13th. The Rays' summer schedule, game line-ups, league standings, pitching schedule, a scoreboard, and team statistics provide an immersive reading experience. Physical descriptions are minimal, though character names imply diversity in Mike’s community.
Will tide over youngsters longing for the start of the sport’s spring season. (more information on Harvey Haddix) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781682634110
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
SEEN & HEARD
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