BASEBALL GREAT

Josh is a hugely talented player who loves baseball and is destined for greatness. His father, who never made it to the majors, takes a job with an independent youth baseball team, pulling Josh from his school team to join him. Josh wants to please his father, but all is not as it should be on the new team. Winning is everything and the coach pushes his players to be ever bigger, stronger and fiercer, insisting on tortuous weight training and surreptitiously passing along “gym candy.” The third-person narration filled with crisp dialogue brings immediacy to Josh’s painful practice sessions, the excitement of his games and his confusion at the flux of middle-school dynamics. Although several of the characters are somewhat one-dimensional, Josh and his friends are well developed and likable. Green carefully constructs the dilemmas and decisions they face as they come to terms with the steroid issues, so that the rather histrionic finale comes across as both plausible and satisfying. A cut above the usual baseball novel. (Fiction. 10-14)