I am not a fan of baseball. I think golf and baseball have to be two of the most boring athletic events out there. However, I recently attended a brown bag luncheon where Vance Law, BYU head baseball coach, was the guest speaker, and decided I really shouldn’t be so hard on baseball. I think if you know the game it’s a lot more exciting than it seems. So when I was perusing the library shelves to pick a book authored by Linda Sue Park and saw that she’d written one about scoring baseball, I thought I had to try it out.Obviously, the book is about more than just scoring baseball. It turns out that it’s a story about hope and friendship. Maggie-o loves baseball, loves the Dodgers (Dem Bums), loves scoring the games, and loves her new friend, Jim. Maggie’s dad is a fireman. He’s hired Jim and Jim is a Yankees fan. He’s as excited about scoring games as Maggie is. However, Jim is called up into the Army and goes to work with an ambulance crew at the front during the Korean War. He’s been writing home to Maggie on a regular basis and then suddenly stops. Maggie doesn’t know why, but continues to write Jim. Later she learns that Jim came home from Korea early and her dad just didn’t know how to tell her why. Jim isn’t talking about what happened and doesn’t want to interact with anyone.
Maggie works on plan after plan to help Jim feel better. Some plans fail totally and other plans have some degree of success. At the end of the book (several years have passed) we are able to see that Jim is finally making some progress and Maggie plans to continue scoring games, even though she’s headed into Junior High, as a way to keep close to Jim.
No comments:
Post a Comment