Posts Tagged baseball

Basbeball Booklist: Four Books For Your Baseball-Obsessed Middle Grader

four middle grade books

Baseball Booklist

It’s officially spring, and when I was in middle school, there was only one thing that meant to me: spring training season! My middle school years were defined by the New York Mets. I couldn’t get enough of them, and the months before spring training were made colder by the lack of heat felt from the sound of a bat cracking against a baseball. The only way that I could tithe my obsession over until the next season was by escaping into books about baseball.

That’s the thing about middle-grade-aged kids. As a mom of one, I see that gripping passion that takes hold when a child finds a passion and becomes blindingly obsessed with it. It’s those moments when they can’t seem to get enough of whatever they’ve fallen in love with that you’ll find the perfect opportunity to indulge them with books. Whether it’s a sport, a band, or a show (Stranger Things obsessed middle grader in my house), you can casually slide a book about it their way and watch them gobble it up. The point is, you’ll get them reading.

“Kids like to read when it’s fun and when it’s relevant to their interests…In addition to wanting to read more, your child will also expand his or her imagination.” – Save The Children, Child Literacy Statistics for Parents

So, for my baseball-obsessed middle graders out there, this list of books about baseball is for you:

Four Books About Baseball

book about baseball and Jackie Robinson

The Hero Two Doors Down by Sharon Robinson

Can you imagine what it would be like for your middle grader to befriend a baseball legend? This middle-grade novel is based on the true story of the friendship between eight-year-old Stephen Satlow and baseball great Jackie Robinson.

Having been a middle-grade fanatic, I can attest that all sports-loving kids dream about meeting their favorite players and even fantasize about becoming friends with them. This story follows Stephen in his Brooklyn neighborhood as he develops a bond with an American hero, tapping into those fantasies.

 

books about baseball Girl pitching on a blue background

Out Of Left Field by Ellen Klages

Katy is the best pitcher in town, and everyone knows it. Then why is she barred from playing for their little league team? Why is it only for the boys? Readers will join Katy’s movement for girl’s rights in baseball in this middle grade novel. She sets out on a campaign with the help of friendly librarians to prove that lots of girls love and play baseball. Katy doesn’t understand why these baseball heroes have gone unknown, but she’s on a mission to change that and the rules of her town’s little league.

Out Of Left Field is the third book of The Gordon Family Saga, which means you may get your child to read more than one book because, as stated above, when middle graders become enamored with something, they can’t get enough.

 

books about baseball with a Girl in a baseball uniform and her arms crossed

Lupe Wong Won’t Dance by Donna Barba Higuera

Speaking of girl activists, meet Lupe Wong—champion of causes. Whether she’s fighting for the expansion of options when it comes to designating one’s race on a school test or demanding less wait time between Doctor Who seasons, Lupe Wong stands for what she believes in.

So, when the chance to meet her favorite baseball player, Fu Li Hernandez—a fellow Chinese Mexican, requires straight As on her report card, she sees no problem…until gym class takes up square dancing. No way Lupe will let that happen.

 

books about baseball player swinging a baseball bat

Baseball Great by Tim Green

This one would be for the older middle-grade reader as the topic of steroids is covered in this riveting story which is as much about a talented young baseball player as it is about a father-son relationship.

Josh’s talent is too good to ignore, especially for his father who pulls him from school tryouts and pushes him toward the traveling youth championship team coached by Rocky Valentine.

Playing baseball is all that Josh wants, but when he’s being pressed to drink protein shakes and take supplements, he knows something is wrong. He and his friend Jaden uncover a dangerous secret and catch the attention of a man willing to do anything to keep the secret from getting out.

 

These four kids books about baseball scream everything I would’ve craved for as a kid.

 

((If you enjoyed this list, you’ll love the list here))

Book Blast: It’s a Number’s Game!

 

To celebrate the release of It’s A Numbers Game! Baseball by James Buckley, Jr., and foreword by Cincinnati Reds’ Pitcher Sean Doolittle on February 2nd, as well as Pi Day on 3/14 and the start of Baseball season, blogs across the web are featuring exclusive spreads from the book plus 5 chances to win a finished copy and a $25 gift card to the MLB Shop!

 

Buy: Amazon | Indiebound | Bookshop
Follow National Geographic Kids: Website | Twitter | Books Twitter | Facebook | Youtube

 

With every hit, ball, strike, and home run numbers are being calculated on the baseball field. Get ready to learn all the ways digits and math factor into the game, from the countless statistics used to measure an individual player’s game to the exact timing used to steal a base.
Read about all the greatest players from baseball history and get fun facts, like what the most retired jersey number is. Discover what countries dominate in the Little League World Series and check out cool graphics that show the frequency of hits to every part of the field. Jam-packed with sports trivia, awesome photos, and fun activities at the end of every chapter, this number-focused look at the game is the ultimate grand slam.
JAMES BUCKLEY, JR. is the author of more than 100 books for young readers on basketball, baseball, football, soccer, and more. A former editor at Sports Illustrated and NFL Publishing, he is also the author of the top-selling annual Scholastic Year in Sports. In the non-sports world, he has written a dozen titles in the New York Times best-selling Who Was…? biography series. He lives in Santa Barbara, California, where he runs the Shoreline Publishing Group, a leading producer of nonfiction for kids.

 

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GIVEAWAY
 

 

 

  • One (1) winner will receive a finished copy of It’s A Numbers Game! Baseball by James Buckley, Jr., and foreword by Cincinnati Reds’ Pitcher Sean Doolittle and a $25 gift card to the MLB store!
  • Check out the other four stops for more chances to win
  • US/Can only
  • Ends 3/21 at 11:59pm ET

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Book Blast Schedule:

March 8th – Frantic Mommy

March 9th – BookHounds

March 10th – Always in the Middle

March 11th – From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle Grade Authors

March 12th – Christy’s Cozy Corners

An Interview with Tony Abbott

Today we’re pleased to talk with Tony Abbott, the author of more than 95 books for middle-grade readers, including the Golden Kite Award winner, Firegirl. Tony’s newest book, The Summer of Owen Todd (Ferrar Straus Giroux, 2017), is the subject of our discussion. (Giveaway Alert! Read all the way through for details.)

The Summer of Owen Todd could be the story of just about any 11-year-old. Summer has arrived, school is over, and for Owen, the days stretch long with the possibility of beach trips, go-kart races, and baseball games with his best friend, Sean. Sean’s own summer plans, however, are derailed by his mother’s new job and the presence of a babysitter, a young man Sean’s mom believes she can trust to keep Sean, who has diabetes,  safe and help monitor his blood sugar levels.  When Sean becomes the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of his new babysitter, Owen is the only person Sean can talk to.  Told entirely from Owen’s point of view, The Summer of Owen Todd addresses a difficult topic as it explores issues of trust, friendship, and bravery.

MH: It wasn’t too long ago that a topic such as childhood sexual assault would have been taboo in middle-grade fiction. When did you know you wanted to write this story?

TA:  The “when” of this story is critical to me. To step back a few years, my wife knew a work colleague, and one day she told my wife a truly horrible story about her son. He was very young, molested, filmed, later told a friend about it, then swore that friend to keep it a secret, which he did. The boy eventually committed suicide. Some years later, his mother approached my wife, knowing I was a writer, saying she was ready to get her son’s story out and wondered if there was a book that could help other children and families. My wife told me about this, and one or two writer friends who had written tough stories for young adults were discussed, but almost from the beginning I had begun to feel some of the tensions and visualize some scenes that would need to be dramatized in any telling. There was something uniquely powerful in those moments. They drew me in.

I have not been molested, though there was a moment in high school, a meeting with an older man, that immediately came to mind, and I remembered how I felt when that happened. I also felt that the ultimate truth of what happened—the suicide—was something that occurred when the boy was approaching adulthood and that any story for younger readers would likely have to end before that. It might have been at this time that the element of telling the story from the friend’s point of view became the way into the tragedy. So, the molested boy’s friend tells the story, and it would chart the days and weeks of the ongoing abuse from the friend’s point of view. If, as I later discovered, from 1 in 7 to 1 in 20 boys is sexually abused, that left the majority of boys as bystanders, friends of the abused. It seemed a way to broaden the story, make it approach real life, to write from the likely reader’s point of view.

These tensions drew me into the story both deeply and quickly and there was no question of talking to other writers; I would try to create a draft to see how it might work. The narrator’s name, Owen Todd, came to me from that place where names come. It wasn’t assembled. It came, he came, with a voice and a personality, as these things often do. I loved him, his vulnerability, his likes and dislikes. I don’t think this is news to any writer. A character is born, not crafted, and that’s the way of it with Owen.

MH: The awful reality of what is happening to Sean is clearly, and yet delicately, stated. How much discussion happened in the editorial process about what words would be used and what words might be avoided?

TA: To begin to answer this, I have to say that the original draft had the characters aged around 8 or 9. The summer was between 3rd and 4th grade. What I knew, but perhaps not completely consciously when I submitted the draft, was that the language I was using, both in conversations between Owen and Sean and in describing the events of the abuse, was pushing the story out of that lower-age area of middle grade stories. To tell the story properly it had to be harsh and raw in parts. To have really worked it for younger readers, some of the language would have to be less precise and more vague. “Bad touching,” instead of the wordage Sean actually uses in the book. I felt that the gauzier language would have made the book poorer as a piece of art and as a representation of reality. So my editor kindly brought me back up to meet my own language, so to speak. The characters are now eleven and in the summer between  elementary and middle school. This made the story match the kind of humor and emotion, description and relationship interaction the characters already displayed. The Summer of Owen Todd may be one of the first middle-grade stories to talk this way about the sexual abuse of a boy, but what is still needed is a book for younger boys who are very much the prey of molesters. Another way of saying this is that I failed to find the way to tell the story I had in mind to a readership lower than ten years old.

MH: I wouldn’t say you failed as much as you adjusted the story you had in mind to fit a slightly older audience. Tell us about the sale of the manuscript. What did your agent say about the manuscript’s marketability?

The first draft was some 18,000 words long. Eighty pages. The events in the published book were mostly all there, but in compressed form, one abuse following the other until the end. My agent at the time, Erica Silverman loved the story as I submitted it. She thought, I suppose, that it was too short as is, but it was like a, what did Dickens call such things, a sledgehammer, and that it would find an editor with an encouraging response. We assembled a list of six or eight editors from different companies and imprints, and Erica sent copies to some of them, keeping a reserve of a few for a second round of submissions. There were a couple of odd passes from good editors, a useful letter or two, but it took a few submissions and weeks to find Joy Peskin at Farrar Straus, an editor who saw the inside of the story, saw what it could be, and knew from the brief draft that I could pull and push and enlarge the story into what it has now become. Joy’s wanting me to go back and draw some of the background characters and situations into the light—Owen’s sister, Ginny; his grandmother; the buying of the go-karts, the baseball game, the outdoor theater—proved to me that the story was both bigger and more real when I made it fuller. We knew from the beginning, Joy, Erica, and myself, that it was a specialized sort of book. Not one that you could market to all comers.

MH: How much outlining/preplotting did you do while writing this book?

TA: I tend to outline very specifically when I write a mystery or a thriller, and I have done quite a few of those. For novels—and yes, I guess I make a distinction between my books this way—there isn’t anywhere near as strict a machine for getting from the first page to the last. There is a very strong thread, I would call it, that I know the story will follow, or that I suspect it will. But there is enough play throughout so that events and motives can transform themselves, and that thread becomes more like a tapestry of several motives, weaving together what is a more complex whole. Some of what results during the writing of the story are, of course, elements I hadn’t the least conceived when I set about to write it. Those surprises are organic and, as such, exciting and life-bearing. All this is to say that I knew where the story would go, how it would end, but not all the features of the landscape.

MH: You capture summer on Cape Cod from the perspective of the locals, which is different from many seaside stories told from the point of view of vacationers. Why did you choose to set the book there?

Place has always been a character in the stories I love to read. Give me descriptions of rooms, weather, streets, the panorama of life. When I start to read a book and I find I don’t feel the place, I don’t go on.  I’ve visited the Cape for decades, just about every summer, often off-season. I am deeply in love with it, want to live and die there, if at all possible. If the characters and their voices and feelings come first, the setting comes quickly after. Where are they speaking and feeling? In this case, everything I knew about living on the Cape would find a home with these boys. I love go-karting, I love the Gut in Wellfleet, Provincetown, Chatham, Brewster, all of those things became living backgrounds for the psychological progress of Owen and of Sean. The idea of being locals; now that’s interesting. I suppose after going there for so long, I don’t feel like a tourist anymore. My wife and I and our daughters have so many “regular” places, it’s like being home.

MH: In the bookstore scene, there’s a nod to Brian Lies’s Bats at the Ballgame when Owen’s little sister Ginny picks out a “picture book about vampire bats playing baseball.”  Is Owen’s choice— “I find a novel about a boy who disappears”— also a nod to one of our own middle-grade contemporaries?

TA: Ha! This is funny. Because Brian lives on the South Shore below Boston, he’s quite familiar with the Cape; I thought of his books immediately when the bookstore scene came around. The novel, the one that Owen would buy for himself, is a veiled reference to one of my own, which isn’t out yet, and turns out to be not a quite truthful description of it, after all (but I still claim it!). I thought I would save Owen’s choice for something of mine, didn’t want it to be an old one, so it sort of just hangs out there as a question: what book is he talking about?

MH: Talk to us about using the truth as a springboard into fiction, as you’ve done so beautifully in this book.

TA: The idea of fact becoming fiction is always fascinating to me. Although the impetus for The Summer of Owen Todd came from a real event, the novel that emerged is almost completely imagined, and this sort of thing happens in an interesting way. The voice of Owen came first, I feel comfortable in saying. Sean’s voice, second. The center of the story would be Owen and his reaction to what  happens to Sean, but also his reactions to summer, which is a big deal in a resort area. So, first the voices, then the setting, then the emotional thread I mentioned earlier begins to establish itself. You know instinctively, I believe, when the novel you are writing cleaves too closely to what really happened, because it lacks a certain kind of fictive truth. Fictive truth, I’m compelled to say, is not less true than what really happens, but creates itself out of the emotional reality of the story you are crafting. If an imagined conversation or event aligns with that truth, then it is as true as life.

MH: Tony, thank you. Thank you for the brave way in which you tackled a project that many would have deemed too difficult. Thank you for generously sharing your process with us. And, thank you, for providing The Mixed-Up Files of Middle-Grade Authors with TWO signed copies of The Summer of Owen Todd for our giveaway. Your kindness is so very appreciated.

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