by Nancy Pearl
Robb White’s Long Way Down and Lion’s Paw
GOOD SPORTS
I like to use sports stories to entice reluctant middle school readers into putting aside their antipathy for (or indifference to) books. The novels that follow usually have a moral (good sportsmanship, primarily, and the different forms it can take), but the moral is never presented in a preachy or hectoring way. So find the sport that your nonreader likes best, and try these. (And don’t forget the sports books found in the 700s in the “Dewey Love Nonfiction” category.)
The baseball novels of John R. Tunis and Duane Decker were popular when I was a kid, and I still remember how much I enjoyed them. So even though a lot has changed (most notably for the Tunis books, the Dodgers are no longer in Brooklyn, alas), the themes remain current and the details of the game are the same as they were way back when the grass was green and the sky over the stadium was blue. My favorite Tunis novels are The Kid from Tomkinsville (now available in a brand-new edition), World Series, and Keystone Kids.
There’s a book for every position on the Blue Sox, Duane Decker’s fictional team; each one follows roughly the same outline—the main character is contending for a job with either a star veteran player, someone who’s seemingly more talented than he is, or his own demons of self-doubt. Of course, at the end of each book Jug Slavin, the manager, has sorted it all out: the good are rewarded and those with lack of dedication are punished (or at least sent down to the minors, forced to retire, or traded to another, less insightful team).You might have to dig these up at used bookstores or search over the Internet, but they’re worth it. I can heartily recommend them all to sports fans, but my favorites are Good Field, No Hit; Fast Man on a Pivot; and Long Ball to Left Field.
Another, more current baseball book is sportswriter Mike Lupica’s first book for kids, Heat. The main character, Michael Arroyo, lives in the shadow of Yankee Stadium and is the star of his Little League team; all he wants is the chance to realize his father’s dream and play professional baseball—but Michael also has a secret, and if the wrong people find out, all of his dreams will be derailed.
John R.Tunis also wrote two novels about high school basketball that I remember with great fondness—Yea! Wildcats! and Go Team, Go!, and Bruce Brooks, author of many excellent books for kids and teens, wrote the introduction to the 1989 edition of Yea! Wildcats!
My favorite sports novel of Brooks’s has always been The Moves Make the Man, because it’s not only good on basketball, but also excellent in its handling of racism and more ordinary issues that teens face. Wherever there’s a potential for heaviness, it’s leavened by Brooks’s sense of humor. Here’s an example: thirteen-year-old African American Jerome Foxworthy, one of the two main characters, describes the game of baseball this way: “Bunch of dudes in kneepants standing up straight and watching each other do very little.”
Other high school basketball novels include Carl Deuker’s Night Hoops and On the Devil’s Court (has Joe Faust traded his soul to be a champion basketball player?); Walter Dean Myers’s Slam!; Airball: My Life in Briefs by L. D. Harkrader; and Last Shot: A Final Four Mystery by veteran sports writer John Feinstein, who brings his inside knowledge of the game to a novel that will please both basketball fans and mystery readers. Sports fans (especially tennis lovers) will want to read about the new adventures of Susan Carol Anderson and Stevie Thomas in Vanishing Act: Mystery at the U.S. Open.
With the immense popularity of NASCAR, I think it would be great if some publisher reissued the sports car racing novels of William Campbell Gault, which were originally published in the late 1950s. Besides telling a good story, Gault is a master at first lines—as you can see in the opening of Rough Road to Glory: “Blood is thicker than methanol and that could be the story of Walt and Eddie and why I had all the trouble with Walt.” What sports fan could stop there? Gault’s other books about gasoline alley include Thunder Road and Speedway Challenge, which opens:The Triple-A boys don’t stop at Oak Grove any more. When my dad was alive, Oak Grove was considered one of the best maintained dirt tracks in America. But my dad died fifteen years ago.
At Oak Grove, on the north turn.
Doesn’t it make you want to read on and learn who’s narrating and what’s going to happen to him?
Gault also wrote a couple of fine football stories—Mr. Quarterback (“Peter Pulaski, that was his name, and a part of the trouble.”) and Mr. Fullback, which, considering they were both written fifty or so years ago, are amazingly modern.
Short pieces about sports are another marvelous way of enticing reluctant readers.They’re also good for reading aloud in a relatively short amount of time. Take a look at these collections: Girls Got Game: Sports Stories and Poems, edited by Sue Macy (with contributions by authors as well known as Jacqueline Woodson and Virginia Euwer Wolff, as well as writers not so familiar, such as Christa Campion and Lucy Jane Bledsoe); and Rimshots: Basketball Pix, Rolls, and Rhythms by Charles R. Smith Jr., a striking combination of photographs, prose, and poetry.
And don’t forget these: Kathy Mackel’s A Season of Comebacks ; The Million Dollar Shot by Dan Gutman (what’s it like for an eleven-year-old boy to be on the free-throw line with one chance to make a million dollars?) and The Million Dollar Kick (same plot, but this time the game is soccer and the main character is a thirteen-year-old girl); both Finding Buck McHenry and The Trading Game by Alfred Slote are solid stories about baseball trading cards, rather than the game itself; the many books by Matt Christopher, which second- through fifth-grade readers tend to love; and Jerry Spinelli’s humorous There’s a Girl in My Hammerlock.
GOOSEBUMPS
In the 1990s, R. L. Stine became famous for writing an immensely popular series of scary books for middle-grade readers. The first Goosebumps book was Welcome to Dead House, and kids have gobbled them up at an amazing rate ever since. But what happens when readers come to the end of the series? Why, recommend these:
When Lewis comes to live with his Uncle Jonathan in The House With a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs, he discovers that his uncle is a warlock, his next-door neighbor is a witch, and Lewis himself has a part to play in saving the world from the forces of evil. The same characters are also found in The Figure in the Shadows and The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring.
There’s witchcraft and wizardry, trouble and terror, fear and fun, in Debi Gliori’s Pure Dead Brilliant, Pure Dead Wicked, Pure Dead Magic, and Pure Dead Trouble, all featuring the Strega-Borgia family along with various servants and pets, including Nanny McLachlan, Latch the butler, Multitudina, the Illerat, and Tarantella, a spider with attitude.
When Darren Shan goes to a rather clandestine freak show, all sorts of gruesome and unusual adventures follow for him and his best friend, Steve. They’re described in a growing series of surprisingly plausible but highly unlikely (I devoutly hope), often very scary novels, beginning the Cirque Du Freak: A Living Nightmare . . . and continuing with (ah, here’s a clue to what the action entails) The Vampire’s Assistant. Evidently not one to rest on the horror laurels he’s already received, Shan’s begun another series, Demonata, in which yet another teenage boy finds himself confronted with unspeakable evil, in Lord Loss. (See the “Up All Night” section for more suggestions of scary reads for older teens.)
Other spellbinding novels for middle-grade readers to gnaw on include My Friend the Vampire, The Little Vampire Moves In, and The Vampire in Love by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg; Edward Bloor’s Story Time; Eva Ibbotson’s rather lighthearted tales of ghostly doings in Dial-a-Ghost and The Great Ghost Rescue; Raven’s Gate and Evil Star, books I and II of The Gatekeepers by Anthony Horowitz (evil in a remote village in Yorkshire, England); Philip Pullman’s Count Karlstein; Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and The Wolves in the Walls (neither to be read when you’re alone in the house); The Empty Mirror by James Lincoln Collier; and three novels about a girl who realizes her job is to help the dead become at peace with themselves or else revenge themselves on their living enemies, The Ghost
of Fossil Glen, The Ghost and Mrs. Hobbs, and The Ghost of Cutler Creek by Cynthia DeFelice.
These goosebumpy books usually work well with reluctant readers, but sometimes what’s even better is to offer these collections of stories, which are perfect for those not inclined to take on a whole book. Among the tested and true are R. L. Stine’s Beware!: R. L. Stine Picks His Favorite Scary Stories (which includes stories from authors like William Sleator, Roald Dahl, and Jane Yolen); A Creepy Company: Ten Tales of Terror by Joan Aiken; Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its sequels; A Terrifying Taste of Short and Shivery: Thirty Creepy Tales and Even More Short and Shivery: Thirty Spine-Tingling Stories, all retold by Robert D. San Souci; and The Headless Horseman and Other Ghoulish Tales, eerie stories from around the world collected and retold by Maggie Pearson.
GREEK MYTHS
The Greek myths have it all: they’re classic tales of bravery, love, violence, heroes, trickery, warfare, and dastardly villains (both mortal and immortal, humans and gods). You can introduce students to the subject through some of the entertaining books below. Take a look, too, at the books in “It Might as Well Be Greek” in Part III for more suggestions for slightly older readers.
For fiction, try these:
As if they’ve come into the twenty-first century straight out of a mythology book, the Greek gods, including Zeus, Dionysus, and others, enter twelve-year-old Percy Jackson’s life with a vengeance, and now he’s been accused of stealing Zeus’s primary lightning bolt. To save his reputation (not to mention his life) Percy has to discover who really took it, before all hell breaks loose on Mount Olympus, in Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief and its worthy sequel, The Sea of Monsters, the first two books in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.
Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris combined to write The Young Heroes series, retelling the great myths with true élan. The series includes Odysseus and the Serpent Maze, Hippolyta and the Curse of the Amazons, Atalanta and the Arcadian Beast, and Jason and the Gorgon’s Blood.
Kate McMullan offers up the lighter side—lots of puns and other word play—in her Myth-o-Mania series, including Have a Hot Time, Hades!, Phone Home, Persephone!, Go for the Gold, Atalanta!, and more.These are great to read aloud, and may inspire listeners to go ahead and read more on their own.
Rosemary Sutcliff makes good use of her prodigious talent for bringing the past to life in Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad and The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of the Odyssey.
In a twist of our sympathies,Tobias Druitt pairs his hero, Corydon (born with a goat’s foot and therefore considered a freak), and the Greek monsters—including Medusa, the Sphinx, two Gorgon girls, and the Minotaur—against the less noble heroes and gods who want to imprison them, in Corydon and the Island of Monsters.
GUARANTEED TO GRAB YOU—MEMORABLE FIRST LINES
I love first lines of books. I can’t imagine a better feeling than opening up a book to the first page and coming across a line or two that is so compelling you just can’t stop reading. Here are some of my favorites.
Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee begins, “I have been accused of being anal retentive, an over-achiever, and a compulsive perfectionist, like those are bad things.”
Deborah Wiles starts Each Little Bird That Sings with this come-hither line: “I come from a family with a lot of dead people.”
“Every night, around nine o’clock in Cold Shoulder Road, the screaming began,” is how Joan Aiken begins Cold Shoulder Road—and don’t you want to find out what the screaming is all about?
Philip Pullman starts The Scarecrow and His Servant this way: “One day old Mr. Pandolfo, who hadn’t been feeling at all well, decided to make a scarecrow.”
Roderick Townley’s The Great Good Thing begins with this intriguing sentence: “Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn’t get to live it very often.”
“Ma, a mouse has to do what a mouse has to do,” is the intriguing first line of Ragweed by Avi.
Who could resist reading further than this sentence that opens Three Terrible Trins by Dick King-Smith:“At six o’clock on the morning of her birthday, Mrs. Gray’s husband was killed and eaten. It was her first birthday, and he was her third husband.”
“If your teacher has to die, August isn’t a bad time of the year for it,” is how Richard Peck’s The Teacher’s Funeral begins.
The opening line of M. T. Anderson’s Feed is, “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”
“Daddy killed Mama today, just like he told her he would,” begins Betty Monthei in her terribly sad first novel, Looking for Normal.
And “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it,” is the way C. S. Lewis introduces The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
HICKORY, DICKORY, DOCK
Of course there’s probably a well-worth-learning back-story of why the mouse ran up the clock, but until we find out what it is, readers can have a wonderful time meeting the mice in these books. One word of warning: rats! They’re nearly always the enemy.
Redwall Abbey is the setting for a series of books by Brian Jacques, who, despite his last name, is British. These exciting, frightening, sometimes a bit violent, and well-written epics, which will remind adult readers of the books of J. R. R. Tolkien, are about the eternal battle between good and evil (mice and rats, respectively). The series begins with Redwall and continues with Mossflower, Mattimeo, and more.
And fans of Jacques’s books will immediately want to turn to The Deptford Mice Trilogy by Robin Jarvis, including The Dark Portal, The Crystal Prison, and The Final Reckoning, all about an ongoing war between the rats (once again the bad guys) and the mice (our heroes) that will determine the future of London, England.
Heather Vogel Frederick’s Spy Mice series, including The Black Paw and For Your Paws Only, features Gloria Goldenleaf, private eye, who, along with her human pal, fifth-grader Oz Levinson, does her best to combat the evil (and intelligent) rats who intend to rid the world of mice under the leadership of the loathsome tough guy (rat), Roquefort Dupont. (Clearly the author owes a debt of gratitude to Margery Sharp, author of The Rescuers and its sequels, probably some of the earliest fantasies for children featuring mice; who could forget Miss Bianca, Bernard, and the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society?)
Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread concerns Despereaux Tilling, a most unusual mouse: not only does he love to read, but he also falls in love with a very human princess. This Newbery Award-winner makes for a great read-aloud, too.
Brother and sister Jennifer L. and Matthew Holm’s Babymouse: Queen of the World!, Babymouse: Our Hero, and Babymouse: Beach Babe are graphic novels featuring an energetic and adorable nine-year-old who just happens to be a mouse—like Ramona Quimby, in fact, if you can imagine her with furry ears and a little tail.
Other mice to meet include the characters in Peter Dickinson’s Time and the Clockmice, Etcetera, the story of three mice families (the Hickorys, the Dickorys, and the Docks, of course) who live happily in the Branton Town Hall Clock until the day it breaks down;Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (rats, rather than mice, but I couldn’t resist putting it in here because kids needs to be introduced to Terry Pratchett’s fertile imagination in every possible category!); The Mousewife by Rumer Godden; The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban (a lovely story to read aloud at Christmas time); Abel’s Island by the dependable William Steig; Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (here the mice and rats are allies); The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Ralph S. Mouse, and Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary; Michael Hoeye’s stories about the debonair mouse and watchmaker, Hermux Tantamoq, including Time Stops for No Mouse, The Sands of Time, and No Time Like Show Time; and Stuart Little by E. B. White.
“I”BOOKS
When I was in the fourth grade, Miss LaFramboise, the art teache
r, came once a week to give our home-room teacher, Mrs. Syllagi, an hour break.To pass the time, she started reading Eleanor Estes’s Newbery Award-winning Ginger Pye out loud to the class. Early in this delightful family story about a lost dog, the reading habits of nine-year-old Rachel and ten-year-old Jerry are described this way:They both always opened a book eagerly and suspiciously looking first to see whether or not it was an “I” book. If it were they would put it aside, not reading it until there was absolutely nothing else. . . . But, being an “I” book, it had to be awfully good for them to like it. Only a few, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Swiss Family Robinson, for example, survived the hard “I” book test. These were among their best beloved in spite of the obvious handicap.
None of us, including Miss LaFramboise, knew what an “I” book was. We had to ask Mrs. Syllagi, and she explained—how could we have missed it?—that it was a book told in the first person. Of course, no one could quarrel with Rachel and Jerry Pye’s three “best beloved” books, but I’d like to think that they’d also really enjoy the books described below:
