The Prince of Fenway Park - Hardcover

Baggott, Julianna

3.89

483 ratings by Goodreads

9780060872427: The Prince of Fenway Park

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006087242X ISBN 13: 9780060872427

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2009

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It's been eighty-six years since the Red Sox won a World Series. Eighty-six years cursed.

Twelve-year-old Oscar Egg be-lieves he is cursed, just like the Red Sox. His real parents didn't want him, and now his adopted mom has dumped him off to live with his strange, sickly dad.

But there's something Oscar doesn't know. The Boston Red Sox really are cursed, and not just because they sold Babe Ruth in 1919. Someone deliberately jinxed the team, and the secret to breaking the Curse lies deep below Fenway Park, with Oscar's dad and the Cursed Creatures, a group that has been doomed to live out their miserable lives below Fenway until the Curse is broken.

Oscar knows he can be the one to break the Curse, allowing the Red Sox to finally win the World Series and setting the Cursed Creatures free. But some of the creatures are angry. Some don't want the Curse broken. Some want Oscar, and the Red Sox, to fail and remain cursed forever.

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About the Author:

Julianna Baggott is a poet and the author of several novels for adult readers, including Girl Talk, The Madam, and The Miss America Family, as well as Which Brings Me to You, cowritten with Steve Almond. As the pseudonymous N. E. Bode, she has written The Slippery Map, The Anybodies, The Nobodies, and The Somebodies. She lives with her family in Tallahassee, Florida.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 5–7—To baseball fans, "The Curse" means only one thing: the Red Sox's 86-year-long failure to win a World Series because their owner sold a young Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919. Working from the brilliant premise that an enraged half-elven fan actually did curse the team, Baggott populates tunnels and back rooms around Fenway Park with a cast of magical creatures from the Banshee ("The Lost Soul of the Lost and Found") to a two-headed sportscaster named The Bobs—and sends into their midst 12-year-old Oscar Egg, a human child destined to break The Curse at last. Baseball is, however, only the context here; the story is really about racism, as exemplified both in Oscar's ruminations over his own mixed ancestry and in what he knows or discovers about the Sox's (and Major League Baseball's) dismal historical reluctance to break the color line. Traveling into the past, Oscar gathers up 12-year-old versions of Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, Willie Mays and other stars for a climactic game against the less-worthy likes of Ty Cobb, Gaylord Perry, and Pete Rose at the same age. Before stands filled with the ghosts of taunting bigots and cheering supporters, that game plays out in tandem with the classic 2004 contest that turned the Yankees-Red Sox playoffs, and the Curse, around. Both whimsical and provocative (the "N" word crops up in some historical references), this story will engage readers who like clever tales, and also those who enjoy chewing over controversial themes.—John Peters, New York Public Library
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