But her essential nature reasserts itself, and the book closes with a strong statement in favor of letting kids' talents and energies have their own heads. Later, it seems as if the narrator will be drawn away from baseball altogether by the pressures of gender conventions. The book is skillfully written: for the first two dozen pages or so, we don't know the gender of the narrator (and some readers will assume the narrator is male, though not, I admit, if they've already read my plot summary).
Girl who idolizes Mickey Mantle is forced by her parents to take ballet lessons.Īnd she ends up learning a lot about herself and about life in the process. The result is not exactly A Separate Peace, but it's something different from (and at times more tedious than) the work of his pulpier contemporaries. Barbour, a prolific sport-juvenile author, foregoes gee-whiz heroics for gentle, drawn-out evocations of school friendships. The title doesn't refer to Chicago at all, but to neophyte pitcher Gil Foster and his catcher pal Jigger Ruthers, who make their way onto the nine and into the hearts of Hillfields School. Two underclassmen lead their boarding school to victory. If you can stand to read yet another fiction about the Red Sox. Young Oscar Egg unearths the real reason that the Red Sox (up to a point) never win the World Series.Ĭlever concept personifies the "Curse" and makes nice use of the magical-realist Big Game motif.
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