Fantasy Baseball
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The Wizard of Oz meets America's favorite pastime!
Alex Metcalf must be dreaming. What else would explain why he's playing baseball for the Oz Cyclones, with Dorothy as his captain, in the Ever After Baseball Tournament? But Alex isn't dreaming; he's just from the real world. And winning the tournament might be his only chance to get back there, because the champions get a wish granted by the Wizard. Too bad Ever After's most notorious criminal, the Big Bad Wolf, is also after the wishes. And anyone who gets in his way gets eaten!
From beloved baseball author Alan Gratz comes a novel in which classic literary characters are baseball crazy, and one real-world boy must face his fears and discover the surprising truth about himself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Continuing to use baseball as backdrop, Gratz (The Brooklyn Nine) moves from historical fiction to fantasy with a story that playfully mixes storybook characters with stadium action. When Alex finds himself in Ever After he's sure he's dreaming case in point, he's recruited to play in a high-stakes tournament for a team captained by Dorothy Gale, she of the ruby red cleats. Dorothy's teammates include lesser-known Oz characters like Tik-Tok, Scraps, and Button Bright, who's in danger of fading away because nobody reads the sequel he appears in. They insist Alex is a "Lark," somebody's daydream, and not a book character at all, but they keep him because the kid can flat-out play. Eventually, Alex figures out whose daydream he is in a thread that adds poignancy and tension to a slightly unwieldy narrative, as the Oz team encounters Mother Goose, the critters from Redwall, L'Engle's Charles Wallace and Mrs. Which and Whatsit, among numerous literary cameos. The predictable ending is the only one possible, but Gratz frames it with an interesting question about what effect dreams can hope to have on the dreamer. Ages 8 12.
