Six Innings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year
A game in the life of a Little League team playing their championship game – and two best friends whose bond is put to the test.
Two teams, six innings, one game.
A lively cast of characters—baseball-loving boys between the ages of eleven to thirteen—are playing the biggest game of their lives. With acrobatic catches, clutch hits, dramatic whiffs, and costly errors, this game is full of action. But as the book unfolds, pitch by pitch, a deeper story emerges, with far more at stake: Sam and Mike, best friends, are trying to come to terms with Sam's newly diagnosed cancer. And this baseball diamond becomes the ultimate testing ground of Sam and Mike's remarkable friendship as they strive to find a way to both come out winners.
This is for the championship.
This is for life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Preller, author of the Jigsaw Jones mysteries, raises his game with this perceptive group portrait of boys who play Little League baseball. The structure couldn't be more hackneyed a championship game with everything on the line but Preller makes it fresh with insightful sketches of each member of the (underdog) Earl Grubb's Pool Supplies team. There's the coach's kid, Branden, who has baseball's "five tools," plus one: he forgets failure immediately. The Sweeney twins are a study in contrasts: Eamon is "ninety-six pounds of stress," while Colin speaks in quotes from baseball movies and jibes the opposing first baseman "I'd love to chat, but I don't think I'll be hanging around for long" before stealing second. Sam, sidelined by a tumor in his leg, calls the game from the press box, aching to play, while Patrick Wong, "the weakest gazelle in the herd," prays from the infield: "Please, God in heaven, don't let them hit it to me." The outcome is predictable but the journey is nailbitingly tense. Kids will be nodding in agreement at the truths laid bare. If Judy Blume could write a book about Little League, about its players' deepest fears and secret dreams, it might come out something like this. Ages 9-14.
