Striking Out - Softcover

Weaver, Will

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0064471136 ISBN 13: 9780064471138

Publisher: HarperTeen, 1995

Synopsis

Up until now, Billy Baggs's life has been loaded with nevers. Never been to a movie. Never played baseball with a real team. Never got over feeling guilty for the loss of his brother. But change is in the air. Billy discovers he has a natural talent for baseball, especially as a pitcher. Maybe, just maybe, there's more in store for him than life on the farm. But can Billy convince his father of that? Or is he destined to spend the rest of his life pitching nothing but hay?Teenager Billy Baggs is desperately needed on his family's struggling dairy farm, but he's also an extraordinarily gifted natural baseball player. How he struggles to reconcile his father's desire to keep him on the farm with his coach's interest in getting him on the field is at the heart of this ‘meaty story.... The complex characters grow and change in profoundly real ways.''K. ‘[With] flashes of humor, a wealth of lovingly recounted details evokes the difficult daily life on a small dairy farm.''Publishers Weekly.

1994 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
1994 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)
1993 "Pick of the Lists" (ABA)

About this title

About the Author

Will Weaver is an award-winning fiction writer. His latest novel is The Survivors, a sequel to his popular young adult novel Memory Boy. His other books include Full Service, Defect, Saturday Night Dirt, Super Stock Rookie, Checkered Flag Cheater, Claws, and the Billy Baggs books Striking Out, Farm Team, and Hard Ball, all of which are ALA Best Books for Young Adults. Formerly an English professor at Bemidji State University, he lives in northern Minnesota, a region he writes from and loves. He is an avid outdoorsman and enjoys hunting, fishing, canoeing, and hiking with his family and friends.

From School Library Journal

Grade 8-12-This novel opens with a rather grisly description of the death of Billy Baggs's older brother in a tractor accident. The action quickly shifts to five years later, when 13-year-old Billy is still wrestling with guilt over Robert's death. An opportunity to play summer baseball offers him some hope of regaining the equilibrium in his life, but his family's numbing rural poverty and his parents' own failure to come to grips with their son's death present further obstacles. This is not strictly a sports book, as other threads in the plot involve a pair of sexy farm sisters and accusations of rape; the beginnings of independence for Mrs. Baggs; and Billy's friendship with a slightly loony member of the baseball team. Unfortunately, not all of these threads come together at the end, and one gets the feeling that either a sequel is in the works or that Weaver tried to stuff too much into an already long text. The author also gets a few details wrong-Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax had already been retired for four years in 1970, but appears on the covers of all the sports magazines. The strongest parts of the story involve the gritty, unromantic descriptions of farm life, and the honest depiction of the deep emotions of the major characters. This depth of feeling makes readers really care about the family, and is probably enough to make this uneven and unruly book worth a purchase.
Todd Morning, Schaumburg Township Public Library, IL
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperTeen
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0064471136
• ISBN 13: 9780064471138
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Illustrator: Koelsch Michael