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
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message.
Two boys equally blessed with both talent and ego vie for supremacy in their school’s annual “creative storytelling competition.”
J is “by far the best artist in the entire fifth grade”; K has “become known as the best writer in the entire fifth grade.” Naturally, each one is determined to crush it in The Contest, and each decides an illustrated story is the way to go. The competitive boys try to undermine one another by passing along fake tips for success, each hoping to destroy his opponent’s story. K advises J to “write what you DON’T know” and to use sixth-person narration. “J’s Secrets to Drawing Really Good” are just as catastrophic and include drawing with your nondominant hand and inserting mistakes to keep readers engaged. Creative hijinks ensue. Craft and Alexander have become known on social media for the jocular trash talk they heap on each other; J and K are their fictional child avatars. As an internet bit doled out in small doses, their frenemy-ship is amusing; as a sustained story about storytelling, it’s thin on both character and plot development. Authorial interjections exhort readers to look up 75-cent vocabulary, often used in barbs directed at each other; the latter feel like in-jokes more than playful attempts to engage young readers. Kids may enjoy spotting references to popular children’s authors among the characters’ names, and budding authors and illustrators will benefit from the advice. J and K are both Black; their classmates and teachers are racially diverse.
An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780316582681
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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