SOUTHPAW SULLY — Review

Thought for the Day:

“You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end — much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.”
~ Brenda Ueland, writer ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

We all want our characters to be truly well-rounded. HERE Deborah-Zehna Adams has the first in a series of posts about how to infuse our characters with energy motivators. This is a very interesting tool.

HERE Shelly Widhalm, guest posting on A Writer’s Path, has a post to help you get past that pesky writer’s block we all are hit with now and then.

K. M. Allan has a great post HERE that will give you 3 Ways to Eliminate Head Hopping When Writing, something we all need to avoid.

It has been a quiet week around here. My beloved San Francisco Giants have been on something of a losing streak, but I keep on watching and keep on hoping. One of the things I like best about this year’s Giants is how young they are. In the last game, we had five rookies in the line-up. And they are not rookies who showed up on day one. The travel between the Giants and their farm teams has been like a fast-moving escalator this year. These young guys have been coming up and going back down with some real frequency. They come up to get experience and go back down to get tinkered with. Last week, we had a new pitcher come up for his major league debut. 22 years old and filled with both confidence and talent, he was pretty exciting to watch. I’m sure he will go up and down a couple more times, but I love knowing he’s in the Giants’ future. And that is what this year is all about — the future. It looks pretty bright to me.

So this baseball talk brings us to the book I will tell you about this week. Carol Baldwin had a review and giveaway of SOUTHPAW SULLY by Steven Carman not long ago. I didn’t win, but the author reached out to me after and asked if he could send me a copy for review. Well, y’all know I love baseball-related books, so I said, sure, send it along. I enjoyed reading it. Let me tell you a bit about it.

Sully has a tough hill to climb. Three years earlier, he was in a terrible accident — one that took his twin brother and Sully’s right hand from him. And in a sense, it took his father from him as well. His father, who used to coach the team, has almost entirely checked out. He even lost his job and now lives in the basement, hardly interacting with Sully or his mother at all. As if Sully doesn’t have enough going on, his cousin Gus is coming from Chicago to spend the rest of the summer. They don’t have much in common, and now Sully will have to share his room. For the first time since the accident, Sully is playing with his old team, the Warriors, and he is back to his old position of pitching. No easy task when he has to throw a pitch and quickly transfer his glove from his stump to his hand for defense.

Against all odds, the team has made it to the playoffs, and they are up against their biggest rivals, the Bobcats. There are some pretty nefarious characters on the Bobcats team, and it’s going to be tough. But Sully has his battery mate, Christina, behind the plate (and in his heart, although he hasn’t told her) and solidly in his corner. Her dad has taken over as coach since Sully’s dad quit after the accident. Sully dreams of winning the championship in honor of his brother, but maybe it’s too big a dream. The Warriors and Sully particularly face nearly insurmountable obstacles at every turn, but Sully keeps his eye on the prize and doesn’t give up easily. Characters don’t always turn out to be who they seem to be, and Sully and his team manage to keep on keepin’ on.

Steven Carman’s writing is solid, although the ending is rather predictable and there always seems to be something or someone who swoops in to turn problems around. Also, there is a lot of slang thrown in that often sounds unnatural, and will certainly date this book quickly. All that said, this is a good, solid middle-grade baseball-themed book that will keep young baseball fans happy. Bonus: There is a nice forward by Jim Abbott (yes, that Jim Abbott) that will give those baseball fans a bit of a thrill.

Please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.