Girl Wonder
A Baseball Story in Nine Innings (With Audio Recording)
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Did you ever hear
the story
of the
Girl Wonder?
Alta Weiss was born to play baseball, simple as that. From the age of two, when she hurls a corncob at a pesky tomcat, folks in her small Ohio town know one thing for sure: She may be a girl, but she's got some arm.
When she's seventeen, Alta hears about a semipro team, the Independents. Here's her big chance! But one look at Alta's long skirts tells Coach all he needs to know -- girls can't play baseball!
Faster than you can say "strike out!," Alta's convinced him to give her a chance. And so with the crowd buzzing and the big game up to her, Alta steps up to the pitcher's mound, determined to prove everybody wrong.
Inspired by the life of pioneering female baseball player Alta Weiss, and dramatized by Terry Widener's bold illustrations, Girl Wonder tells the unforgettable story of a true American original.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Widener (The Babe & I; Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man) makes a triumphant return to the baseball diamond with his acrylic artwork at once playful and emotionally authentic spotlighting another praiseworthy player from the past. His animated, period paintings are in perfect pitch with the winning tone of Hopkinson's (Fannie in the Kitchen) story, relayed in the voice of "girl wonder" Alta Weiss. Growing up on an Ohio farm in the early 1900s, the girl aims at a target on a bale of hay as she practices her pitching in the barn, where the cows "turned their saucer eyes to watch me my first fans!" As a teen, she talks her way onto an all-male semipro baseball team, slyly convincing the coach that ticket-buyers will turn out "to see a girl play." Pitching to the first batter in her debut game, Alta endearingly attempts to calm her nerves when all eyes are on her and the count is full: " 'No different from my fans in the barn,' I tell myself." During her first and a subsequent season, the heroine says, "I... always held my own against the best." She then moves on to score in another admirable field after completing medical school as the only female in her graduating class. Cleverly organized into nine brief "innings," this graphically rich, rewarding tale will inspire readers on several counts. Ages 5-8.
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