The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane
In the 1960s a guy named J.C. Martin made a living catching the great Hoyt Wilhelm’s knuckleball. Doug Mirabelli always caught Tim Wakefield and his knuckleball for the Red Sox. They were called “personal catchers.” Catching a knuckleball was so difficult and so unpleasant for most regular catchers that if you could do it reasonably well (nobody did it really well), that one skill could keep you on the team. The personal catcher would sit on the bench until the knuckleballer took the mound, and then he and his special floppy mitt would enter the game. It was an odd kind of intimacy, to be joined together like that, a weird baseball marriage (p 74-75).
How can I express how much I enjoyed this book? It blended many of the themes present in several of this year’s best children’s books (see OCL’s Mock Newbery List): death and abandonment, grief and alienation, discrimination and friendship. Yet none of these drowned the story and baseball tied it all together.
[SPOILER ALERT]
Baseball is what helps Molly hold herself together. It helps her come to terms with her father’s death and to discover herself. It is how she codified life:
Molly meanwhile was fantasizing about a scoring system not for baseball but for life. If she said something stupid, if she forgot to bring home her science book – those would be errors. If her mother came through for her and a third of the time – that sounded about right – her batting average would be .333. Back when her locked has been defaces and Lonnie came along and rescued her, he could have been credited with a save” (p 147).
The setting – Buffalo, NY – was a perfect choice. Like Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, whose wintry and bleak Syracuse, NY setting gave the perfect backdrop to Melinda’s troubles, the gloomy Buffalo is “like Siberia, a place you’d go to disappear, or to be punished” (p 115) to this story. It supports Molly’s suspicions that her father’s job was “taking the starch out of him” (p 37) and that her mother was like a flower withering in such grey desolation.
My father, like Molly’s, was a reporter for the local newspaper, covering equally mundane and repetitious stories. While scavenging to salvage some of her father’s memorabilia, Molly stumbles across one of her father’s notepads. At first hopefully it will contain some sort of explanation for his mysterious death, she finds it blank and instead stages a mock interview with her father (p 55). I thought this and all the other little steps Molly took toward forgiving her father was exceptionally well done.
[END SPOILERS]
If you enjoyed this book, I recommend No Cream Puffs by Karen Day and Playing the Field by Phil Bildner.
The Aurora County All-Stars by Deborah Wiles
People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.
- ROGERS HORNSBY
SECOND BASEMAN, ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
A perfect spring read! Wiles combines baseball with pageantry, poetry with a baby-eating old man and community with betrayal to make a “symphony true.” Wiles models this story after the Victorian serial novel with cliff-hanging suspense, magical mystery , oaths of secrecy, moral dilemmas, matters of identity, startling surprise, dollops of sentimentality… and dead guys. She succeeds!
One of my favorite illustrators/writers, Marla Frazee, did the cover illustration. I only wish more of her work was included throughout. I pictured all of the characters based on her cover art and style!
From the back cover: Twelve-year-old House Jackson – star pitcher and team captain of the Aurora County All-Stars – has spent an entire year with a broken elbow. Every afternoon, instead of going to baseball practice, he has sat by the bedside of a mysterious old man and read to him. Now house is healed and ready to play, but the pageant for the town’s 200th anniversary is scheduled for exactly the same time as his teams ONLY game of the year. And guess who’s directing the pageant? Why, it’s House’s nemesis (and perpetrator of the elbow break), the theatrical, full-of-herself, fourteen-year-old Frances Shotz. How can House get himself – and his team – out of this mess?
No Cream Puffs by Karen Day
Madison is the first girl to play organized baseball with the boys in Michigan… Read about how Madison navigates the cinfusing and often treacherous waters of friendships, mother-daughter relationships and first boyfriends as she learns to listen and trust that voice inside of her. -Karen Day
This book is a delightful slice of 1980: neighborhoods (remember those? when everyone knew everyone on the block), Kool-Aid, and banana bikes. Madison is a lively twelve-year-old who just wants to be: a girl, a gifted athlete, a girlfriend (Tommy is so cute!). But everyone else is so busy judging her because she is the first girl to play little league baseball that she’s getting confused! Soon the whole town is weighing in, tearing Madison further from her friends, her mother and the sport she just loves to play.
In addition to taking me back to the glorious decade of my youth, I’ve learned there is a name for my favorite breakfast (has been a fav since the 80s!). “An egg pop is a fried egg laid across a piece of toast smothered in butter and jelly” (p139). No Cream Puffs is an solid read with a hooking beginning (Fight! Fight! Fight!).
The protagonist is fiesty enough to carry through but young enough to make mistakes along the way (I could have been reading about myself had I been born a decade earlier). The secret concerns she has are so touching and endearing that it is easy to relate to and love her. “I slip on my uniform and stare in the mirror. HINTON’S, the name of the team’s sponsor runs across the front of my shirt in red letters. No matter how hard I tug at the shirt, my left breast refuses to go anywhere but in the middle of the O. It’s as if someone has drawn a red target around it” (p 29). So she wears leotards underneath even though it scrapes her underarm.
I highly recommend this to young female athletes who also like a touch of romance.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game…
So my Library hooked me up with two tickets to a Lakewood Blue Claws (minor league) baseball game. When I arrived with my boyfriend, I saw many people holding inflatable OCL noise makers. Woo woo! And then, Sparks, our Library’s Mascot, appeared! And the Blue Claws Mascot (I don’t know what it was supposed to be) got jealous and appeared right next to Sparks. So I snagged some pictures:
