Free Baseball by Sue Corbett

coops. foul ball. Felix, playing on his baseball team, shakes his bottom at his teammates who are razzing him (a visual swear word).

foul ball two. Felix tells his coach a "white lie" that he feels a "little sorry" for.

foul ball three. Felix's mother can't take him to the ball park when he wins tickets from the local radio show to a local farm team's game. She is a hard-working, single mom and can't get time off work, so she sends him with the babysitter. A number of circumstances, fueled by his understandable resentment, lead to his hitching a ride in the luggage section of the team bus and taking over for the team's ball boy who did not show up for work. It was not qutie a strike but a definite foul that he stowed away when his mother was coming to pick him up! The circumstances of the book explain much better how this could happen.

I can't help but be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to a book that slips in a phrase describing Felix's math class as "dragging on exponetially." :)

Now the story slides into a homerun after these bumpy hits as Felix, who lives and breathes baseball, gets to care for the team's laundry, toss some balls with the manager, mingle with the players and play with the team's smart, mascot dog.

Felix’s mom eventually catches up with him at the end of a baseball-filled day in which Felix endears himself to the team. She tells Felix a wrenching story about his father, a famous and talented Cuban baseball player. The family tried to escape Cuba together, and his father selflessly gave up his spot on an overcrowded boat to give Felix and his mom a chance. He thought he might have a chance to join them later since he was a well-known ball player.

Instead, he was forced for political reasons to denounce them, and for political-protection reasons, he formally divorced Felix's mom. After it became clear that he would not be able to leave the country, he remarried. It’s an exceptional case. Felix comes from a Catholic background, but it’s barely alluded to, and isn’t part of this discussion with his mom. Such an exceptional case would be an interesting discussion...

SAFETY RATING: 2.5 Flags

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Secrets of a Civil War Submarine by Sally M. Walker

We listened to this one on CD, and it captured our interest from Dad on down.

Sally Walker takes us through an account of the Civil War submarine, the H.L. Hunley, from its design and Civil War exploits to its discovery and excavation from the ocean floor in the 1990's. A tween well-versed in mechanical engineering may skip right over how the sub actually worked, but I had to listen carefully. Even if you understand ballast, bouyancy, etc., it's impressive how fragile this early sub was and how courageous the crew to take it anywhere, let alone the sea and to war.

Not that their bravery got them as far as they would have liked. You just cringe each time a crew member is lost (spoiler: it sank 1 boat and the rest was tragedy after tragedy). The boat never made it back to port after it sunk its first warship, and the second half of the book is dedicated to explaining its discovery and excavation. It's a fascinating glimpse into a small slice of history and into modern archealogy.

As much as we liked it on CD, the book loses too much with mere audio. The actual hardback has interesting, informative pictures throughout. It's a quality book.

You'll enjoy many things with this book: history, civil war battle, subs, engineering, human ingenuity and tenacity, and treasure-hunting.

SAFETY RATING: 3 Flags

Historical Fiction: American Civil War

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Swear to Howdy by Wendelin Van Draanen

Some of the best books written start in one place and end in another.

Such is the situation in Swear to Howdy. It starts as a laugh-out-loud story of two boisterous boys who live next door to each other and are best friends. They begin their first, unbreakable secret pact when Joey gets bit in the private parts by a fish, and Russell swears-to-howdy that he won’t tell a soul such a temptingly funny tale.

Now, Joey got himself in such a predicament because his skivvies weren’t on, and that was due to their interference with the fine art of teaching Russell how to fart on command. (Such a thing has much visual appeal when you are submerged.) Some might find this a bit coarse, but being the mother of a boy who finds bodily functions far more intriguing than I do, it tickled my funny bone.

The antics, of course, do not end there. Next, we have bugs stuck in drinks, dying goldfish, and Tank, the enormous frog who squirts green poo when squeezed. The tone starts to shift a bit when the boys practice shooting squirrels who are destroying the driveway, but accidentally kill the family cat.

It’s with the late-night prank of hanging a homemade ghost in a tree to lower and scare passing drivers that things in the book take a serious turn and the tone shifts quite a bit. They happen to lower the ghost for a car that has faulty brakes, and when the driver hits the brakes, the car runs into a post, and kills the driver who is the teen-age sister of Joey.

Joey also is the son of an angry, drinking father with little compassion or patience. His family is a complete contrast to Russell’s. Joey and Russell once again make a pact not to tell what they did with the ghost, and while everyone is in shock and mourning, Joey is suffering worst of all, and Russell is silent and struggling. It comes to a head when Joey wakes Russell in the middle of the night and takes him out to drink fermented blackberries. Joey gets drunk and breaks down sobbing, and Russell is at a loss.

Russell decides to check on Joey a little later and finds Joey just about to shoot himself. He stops it, drags Joey across the street to his house where his mother and father protect Joey from his father’s wrath as the whole story is exposed as Russell chooses to break the pact in order to help Joey. Joey, though, considers this a betrayal.

It is a very powerful ending about what it does and does not mean to be a true friend.

I’d like to give this a full safety rating as it was an outstanding story, but it is a mid-to-younger reading level for tweens, and I think the theme needs parental scrutiny for that age group due to its intensity.

Safety Rating: 1 Flag

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Aliens Ate My Homework by Bruce Coville

If a pudgy, nerdy kid took a creative writing class, he might come up with a plot just like this one. Coville, of course, is not a kid, and he makes this goofy plot work well enough to tweak a lot of tween’s humor and imagination.

Rod Allbright takes a lot of grief from the classroom bully: BKR. And BKR is not your average bully. It is not that he is particularly sadistic; what makes him an extra-special bully is the odd fact that he is an alien.

Rod finds this out when a small alien ship breaks through his window, and expels several tiny aliens who deputize him to help them in their inter-galactic mission to capture a criminal hiding out on Earth… who turns out to be none other than BFK, disguised as an earthling child.


The bumps in the road on the way to a solidly safe tween read are as follows: Rod’s greatly troubled by the loss of his father. He has no idea what happened to him, other than a reference to the fact that his father lied to his mother and is gone.

One of the aliens comes from a planet that has no gender, and makes funny and vague references to this fact. It’s all harmless enough to play fast and loose with gender amongst aliens on another planet, but considering the state of gender politics in our culture, I’m always suspicious when this idea that gender-is-meaningless-for some-creatures gets trotted out. Tweens (in some environments, anyway) probably wouldn’t be too aware of any of this, but the intrinsic nature of our gender and its importance is a topic I don't want adults with certain views tinkering with even if it's quite subtle.

So… it wasn’t a total surprise to my critical eye when the aliens have a discussion in which they state that empathy is the thing that separates animals from humans (and intelligent aliens). It's a materialistic view of the universe that brushes close enough to the truth to fool a non-critically-thinking tween. Empathy is a fine emotion, especially if it impels someone to use his free-will to act compassionately upon it. But the difference between humans and animals is the soul made in God’s image! And that not only separates humans from animals but allows for the divinely-inspired virtues like mercy, forgiveness, and self-sacrificial love/charity.

Empathy vs. God’s image. One of those differences that makes all the difference.

Safety Rating: 2 Vatican Flags

See: The Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Man: 355
In the image of God: 356; 357; 358
Male and Female: 383

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